I thoroughly enjoyed the 3 hours of driving I put in during the 12 Hours of Sebring. I started the morning by making a silly mistake; I'd run the qualifying for our team but I held off registering for the session when it began. This meant we didn't have a qualy time and started 21st in class. My time would have seen us starting on pole in the GT3 class. The reason I didn't sign in before the race began was in order to avoid having my higher iRating affect our team's average. We were placed into the 2nd bottom split, and I don't think having me registered would have changed that anyway.
Thankfully, Bobby had an awesome first two hours in the car and by the time I took over he'd climbed up to 2nd in class. After my first hour I'd got us up into the lead. Bobby did another hour and then I settled in for my double fuel stint. I made my 2nd mistake of the race when I did my mid stint pit stop; I failed to tick the "beginning fueling" box. Luckily I still had 1.5 laps in the tank when I stopped, so I was able to do another lap and then return to the pits to get fuel. That dropped us down to 2nd and I spent my 3rd hour in the car pushing very hard to make up for it. I was able to close the gap and even build enough of a lead to give us a stop in hand.
I finish my driving duties very proud of my effort. I had picked up only 4 incident points; 1 when avoiding a wreck and 3 small off tracks where I ran slightly wide on corner exit. Getting out of the car and knowing that the next driver was going to rejoin in the lead with a healthy gap back to 2nd was a great feeling.
Our team held the lead for another 4 hours, but ran into some trouble in the final 2 hours of the race. An accident resulted in an 11 minute pit stop for repairs and when the 12 hours were over our car was down in 8th place in class.
I'm definitely looking forward to running more of these endurance races in the future, maybe even enough to warrant building a solid team. In the mean time, I'll also be looking at running in the new Blancpain Endurance series. This week it is off to the Suzuka GP for 3 hours. This series allows people to solo drive the whole 3 hours.... which is tempting.
My clean driving led to a nice fat Safety Rating gain:
Our car looked very nice thanks to a paint job created by another r/iRacing user:
Here's what it looked like after some hard racing:
Finally, this is a screenshot I snapped as I left home for a BBQ. With 2 hours to go we were being chased down by a hard charging 2nd; they were 5 seconds behind at this point, they're one of the cars in the pack back down the road in this screenie:
