Nightmare Week in Spa
30th July 2007
The 24 hours of Spa was the 6th round of the FIA GT Championship 2007 held
on the 28th and 29th July in Spa-Francorchamps / Belgium.
After a good start in the 1.Free Practice Session with the 4th fastest time
the Aston Martin Racing BMS Team was not blessed with luck. Jamie Davies and
Fabio Babini who share the car in the FIA GT season this year had two more
drivers in the car for the 24 hours, Ferdinando Monfardini and Diego Alessi.
Ferdinando drove the out lap in the 2. Free Practice Session on Thursday afternoon
and crashed the car heavily into the wall. It was not his fault; it was a technical
problem with the throttle. The throttle was stuck open at 66% (equivalent to
around 500bhp) when Ferdinando tried to lift off the throttle to turn into “Stavelot” but
the throttle never closed. He shifted down two gears and spun the car. Luckily
he hit the wall with the rear of the car and not the engine. The team couldn’t
do the two Qualifying Sessions Thursday evening because the mechanics had a
big job to fix the car and they were waiting for parts to be delivered from
England (Prodrive). The team stayed up all night to get the car fixed for the
qualifying session on Friday morning but the glue to bond the chassis together
was not dry enough to run the car properly in the 3.Qualifying Session and
therefore only Ferdinando and Diego did one lap each to qualify themselves
for the race. Fabio and Jamie didn’t need to do this because they have
raced in Spa many times before and their past race experience gave them an
automatic qualification for the race.
The team worked again all day and night to get the car completely ready for
the Warm Up on Saturday morning and they did a brilliant job – the car
was ready to leave the box at 10am Saturday morning and looked brand new.
Fabio started the race at 4pm on Saturday from the back of the GT1 grid because
they couldn’t set a time in the three qualifying sessions. In his first
stint Fabio came up to P8 when he changed over to Jamie and Jamie came up to
P7 in his stint before the other two drivers in their stints held P7. Everything
seemed to be going ok for the team so far.
In the fourth lap of Diego’s 2nd stint (11pm) he crashed the car and
the team lost around 23 minutes (10 laps) with the repairs. After that the
team was playing catch up with the rest of the field but the next problem came
when Jamie had his stint in the night. The car just stopped on the circuit
and Jamie was on the radio in contact with the team to find the problem. After
20 minutes stuck on the circuit they found the problem – the throttle
sensor. Jamie managed to get the car back in first gear and let it run on tick-over
back to the pits where it took the mechanics another 15 minutes to fix the
car and Jamie went out again. But it wasn’t the last problem for the
team. It started spitting with rain at some points on the circuit and the conditions
were really difficult to judge. Jamie was pushing so hard to close the gap
to the rest of the field and towards the end of his stint the car snapped in
the high speed “Pouhon” corner where it had spotted with rain and
he glanced the tyre wall. He continued for another two laps but the front right
light was damaged and he went back to the pits to get it replaced. This incident
cost another 8 minutes taking them to around 4am. Diego Alessi was back in
the car in the morning and after 14 hours and 46 minutes into the race (6.46am)
he crashed the car again and the race was finished for car No.23. He hit the
wall with 250km/h and destroyed the car completely.
Jamie:”The whole week was just a week of disasters and we were hoping
that the luck comes our way at some point but it never came. I hope we used
all our bad luck up at this race to have some good fortune for the remaining
races in this season.”
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