Just eight weeks after the serious crash into a concrete wall at the Historic Grand Prix Zolder, the Classic GP was held at the TT Circuit Assen in the Netherlands last weekend. The accident had caused severe damage to the front and rear suspension, chassis and bodywork.
The repair of the bodywork was a formality and the timely rebuilding of all four suspensions depended largely on the delivery time of important components from England. However, it was not clear from the outset whether the chassis could still be saved. To cover all eventualities, a replacement chassis in mint condition could even have been obtained, just in case. Ultimately, however, this was not necessary because the original chassis was repairable.
The to-do list hardly got any shorter, but the shift lengths got longer with each passing day. In the two weeks before the race weekend in Assen, every shift became a night shift. The rolling chassis was completed on September 1st and the marriage with the bodywork took place on September 2nd. This left ten days until qualifying on Friday, September 13, to make all the adjustments to the new front end and connect the electrics, water, oil and fuel lines. But the biggest challenge was setting up the completely new suspensions. Getting the basic settings right for the roll-out took a day and a half. As a result, the departure to Assen had to be postponed from Thursday to Friday.
The car drove the first meters under its own power down from the trailer in the paddock at 11 a.m. on Friday. Accordingly, not all teething troubles had been eliminated. A leak in a fuel line was fixed at 12:45 in the pre-start and the throttle cable had to be adjusted during qualifying. Otherwise, the roll-out went without a hitch. Only the driver's exhaustion took its toll. That's why I declared qualifying over after one reasonably clear lap so as not to risk any unnecessary driving errors. It was clear that the rear left tire tends to rub in right-hand bends. Based on this experience, the set-up could be refined.
After the essential midday nap, the rear left camber setting was adjusted. Otherwise, only the usual checks were carried out on the vehicle. Of course, special attention was paid to the renewed components, which had not yet been tested after the repair. Fortunately, all these components worked exactly as intended.
The lap time in qualifying was enough for 37th place on the grid out of 44 participants. However, it has to be said that two faster participants were placed at the end of the grid due to rule violations, otherwise it would have been 39th place. In the race, I was in 37th place on the second lap when I made a serious driving mistake in the fast left-hand bend before the start/finish chicane. I did an extremely scary 360° spin (
https://youtu.be/GvQW6J3Z4Is?feature=shared), dropped back to 40th place and half a lap later the safety car came out. After that, there was only one more lap at race pace before a red flag came out after an accident involving several cars. In total, this race had only had 3 - 4 racing laps. This was very unsatisfactory for a race, but quite useful for an extended roll-out. I learned something about the limits of the car and got new feedback to improve the set-up.
For the second race, we changed the camber on the front and rear axles again and carried out the usual checks. The car felt transformed at the start of the second race. The starting lap was already close to my personal fastest lap of the weekend and the second lap was immediately three seconds faster. Unfortunately, the progression ended at this point because the grip of the soft Pirelli semi-slicks completely disappeared from one lap to the next. The feedback from the car was as if it was going to break out of control every second. So after the scare from race 1, I decided not to go on a time hunt, but to drive towards the finish in 39th place and take points for the championship standings. So the race more than fulfilled its purpose as a roll-out and damage limitation for the championship. For the season finale at the Nürburgring, I'll also have a fresh set of hard tires.
I am now back in seventh place in the Belgian championship standings for pre-1982 historic vehicles (without FIA-HTP). Unfortunately, the calculation of the points favors the high-displacement vehicles very strongly, so realistically I can hardly make up any ground with the last race at the Nürburgring. In purely mathematical terms, fifth place would still be possible. But if things go really badly, I could even slip down to 13th place. In previous years, I was 20th (2023) and 17th (2022) in the final standings.
Nonetheless, I view the race weekend in Assen as a big succes, because this accident would have been season-ending in all the years prior to 2024. To have a succesful roll-out and after that still one race weekend to go is just great.
