Travels with Robin Liddell Monterey Magic Well, Laguna Seca, what can I say? Great track, great place, great food, great weather. Surely there must be something bad I hear you ask. Well as a matter of fact to all you cynics out there no there wasn’t. We even got our best finish of the year aboard my PK Sport Pirelli shod Porsche GT3-RS. The season has held some promise up until now having qualified 3rd at Trois Rivieres and run in the top three in several races but for various reasons we have not finished well. Main Men My weekend began with meeting my new engineer George Robb Main, a local to Laguna and a new addition to our team. George really helped the team over the weekend and with his experience on the Alex Job team working with Porsches in the past he did a great job of setting the car up. My teammate for the weekend was Italian driver Alex Caffi, someone with loads of experience in just about all categories from 4 years in F1 with amongst others Arrows, to Super Touring cars and GT’s. Alex and I met about 2 years ago when I was trying to get his seat in the Riley and Scott in the FIA Sportscar Championship and now we were to be sharing the same seat! We got on great and the good thing about working with a more experienced guy is that normally they are more mature and recognise they don’t need to be quickest in every session i.e. you don’t end up battling with just your team mate. Setups On an ALMS weekend you have an hour and a half practice Friday, two one hour sessions Saturday followed immediately by qualifying and race Sunday. The first session we just concentrated on race setup, George trying to get a feel for our car and making some radical setup changes along the way. We were running the car a lot stiffer than normal which gives the driver more feel but as we discovered the problem we had was the car doesn’t ride the bumps very well particularly as our dampers (shocks) are not valved for that kind of setting. The first practice saw us just inside the top ten with me doing most of the driving as I was learning the track whereas Alex had been there on two previous occasions in a sportscar. After a thorough debrief Day 1 we managed to make some improvements to the car on Day 2 and gradually worked our way up to 5th by the end of the 2nd session on Saturday which was much more promising. Understeer, Oversteer, Traffic……pick one from three Into qualifying then and I went out in the car on new rubber and a low fuel load. We had opted to run on a soft rear tyre, which with the benefit of hindsight was not the best decision but all will be revealed! On my first run I was third quickest but inevitably would drop down the order as all the cars took to the track. In the first run I did my quickest time on my second flying lap, but unfortunately had a little too much understeer in the car through the infield section. We then made a setup change and on my second run matched my lap time on now worn tyres but found I had a little too much oversteer! Racing drivers are never happy it’s true! This second run Johnny Mowlem held me up a little on an in-lap but the whole lap I was on a knife edge so I was quite happy with my own performance. My time put us 7th on the grid so not great but the times were pretty close. Lycra Liddell Race start Sunday saw another bright sunny day with lots of pretty girls wandering around in Lycra spandex! Naturally I was far too busy to take it all in since I am a professional driver and was focussing on my race ahead. Right. Anyway race start saw a real carve up with cars spinning and tyre smoke into Turn 2, which is really the first corner. This presented an excellent opportunity for a brave Scotsman so round the outside I went and into 3rd. Thank you very much! Sticky Business The safety car came out straight away but on the restart I had a great battle with the Petersen Porsche with Craig Stanton at the wheel and the Risi Ferrari with Anthony Lazzaro driving. Eventually I started to struggle through the right-handers as we had one of those soft rear tyres on the left rear. (You have to start on three of the four tyres you qualify on so we had opted to change the right rear for durability, most corners at Laguna being left handers, but were stuck with the left rear). The tyre went off initially causing some oversteer and eventually Lazzaro lined me up through turn 10 and made the pass into 11. I should say at this point that Pirelli have been fantastic. Our tyres have been superb and the service we have received from them throughout 2003 has been second to none. Brave Sir Robin Anyway I then got my head down and gradually started to catch the Petersen car. I could see he was struggling into turn 1 with a locking brake but was unable to capitalise as I was slow out of turn 11 which is the last corner and very slow. We were running our Le Mans diff so the revs were quite well down there. As a result my exit speed was compromised out of 11 thus I couldn’t get a run into 1. I was quicker into the corkscrew though and on the downhill section after the exit managed to slip by into Turn 9 for third place and then eked out a gap of 12 seconds before pitting to hand over to Alex. It was a Gas man………. It should be noted that I pitted early due to running out of fuel, which was a surprise as the team had calculated that we could easily run to one stop but it became clear we had a fuel feed problem. Alex quickly got on the pace but Johnny Mowlem was now in the Petersen car and catching us for third, which he duly took. We stayed comfortably in 4th until about 10 minutes before the end he started (predictably) to run out of fuel. By this time there was some serious lip biting in our pit and the gap between Cort Wagner in 5th and Alex in 4th was dropping rapidly. In fact the gap dropped from 20 seconds to half a second and by some stroke of luck he managed to hang on. The winning Audi came past on the last lap and as a result the flag fell and we held onto fourth place, our best finish of the season so far behind the winning Alex Job McKenna Porsche, the Risi Ferrari 360 in 2nd and the Petersen White Lightning Porsche in 3rd. Miami Vice I am now looking forward to the ALMS Miami street race. Trois Rivieres was my first time on a street track and I qualified 3rd, our best of the season and only half a second off the Alex Job pole time. You need to be committed but extremely precise and clearly there is no room for error. Our car seemed to be better suited to the streets so I want a result at Miami! |
Robin Liddell |
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