This year makes the seventh time I’ve competed in the AROCA 6 hour relay at Winton. Once again I was asked to join the team Maschi di Alfa which makes for a fun weekend as the team is well organised and has most everything sorted. Saturday practice/qualifying day was filled with mechanical drama for me with a fuel delivery problem and a suspension problem. Thanks to some help from the boys at Maranello Pur Sang motors we were able to resolve these and get running again with enough practice to guess at a nominated lap time.
Sunday was very warm and many cars were having problems with overheating on the day. I was called onto the track a bit before halfway through the event, and was pleased to see I could get down to my nominated time (a relatively slow 1.53) pretty quickly. The lap board showed a few bonus laps (within a second of the nominated time) which was encouraging. Lots of fun picking my way through the traffic and allowing faster cars to come through without losing too much time.
In the end we had a few challenges with the heat and car reliability (not ours) and didn’t do as well as we’d hoped, but it was still good enough to deliver a seventh place outright. We also won the ‘Tony Hawker’ trophy for the best all-Alfa team for the second year which was very satisfying.
