And here we are in The Cathedral of Speed (TT Circuit of Assen) 🤗
Many new people on the team (welcome Dave, Leon, Marco and Marloes) but also the fixed people Jelle, Nicole, Mart and of course the riders Peter and me.
It was set to be a very very hot day. All day sun and temperatures starting with 24℃ and at its peak 31℃ during the race. This year we made some strategy changes because we where like last year (due to a accident of the 3rd) with only 2 riders. Also new pit stop strategies and communication with the riders. We made a cookbook and had team meetings to make it stick with the team. This sounds very professional but the first line in the cookbook was to have fun 😜. And we did!
Since it was already hot and we had 2.5 hours for each rider we did only 3 laps per rider for training and qualification. This seems little but the rhythm was already good and on qualification at both our personal bests for the race track. But, the field of 56 riders was very strong and we qualified for the 50th position. This seemed like very slow, but even if we went 3 seconds faster we would still be in the 40’s and that was not possible for us. So the strategy was, be consistent in the race and get them back one by one.
Peter started the 4 hours and last year so I was to start this year. Having a conversation with Peter and Jelle they told me you don’t hear you engine running due to the amount of other bikes also starting and making noise. Look at the rpm indicator to see if the bike is running. Don’t try to run like crazy to the bike, the risk to fall and make a error is just to great. So my start was calm and for me I could have gone a little faster but I did not make any mistake and left with a decent speed.
Since there are always people thinking you can go fast in the first round, there was immediately a crash in the rusthoek and there was a yellow flag. Nothing big but had to take some caution. But when we entered the start finish a lot of bleu smoke and more yellow flags meant a engine blew and be careful. In the first corner there was a lot of oil on the track and I almost fell down. In the video you can see that riders behind me also fell. So we had code 60 for quite some time. Since the first stint was scheduled for 19 laps (± 40 minutes) I still had a long time to go when the lights went green again. One of the changes was when there were <5 laps on the board and your in the first sector with code 60 PIT! And I had 3 laps to go and yes we had code 60 so I went in after being almost 50 minutes on the track. With this strategy change we did not loose time or a position during the change and Peter went out. We thought we would do 02:00.000 ~ 02:05.000 lap times but to our surprise they where very constant and in the 01:56.000 ~ 01:58.000. Much faster as we thought we could do.
Time was ticking and we where in 11th of our class at some time but due to not having changed yet we fell back a little bit. We finished 17 in our class and 27 overall. We where all very pleased with the performance and fun we had. The team functioned like they where doing it for a long time. It tasted like much more so we already have plans for next year.
