Frikadelli Racing starts the second half of the season with a P8 finish
19.08.2018
After two consecutive race wins, Frikadelli Racing kicked off the second half of the Endurance Championship Nürburgring (VLN) with an eighth place finish and one retirement.
For the fifth out of nine championship rounds, the Porsche number 31 shared by Norbert Siedler from Austria and his German team mates Lance David Arnold (Duisburg) and Alex Müller (Rees) crossed the line in sixth position after a great charge through the field, before they were eventually classified eighth. Their 911 GT3 R had to start from the pit lane because of a so-called code-60 penalty for exceeding a particular speed limit in qualifying. Because they started from the pit lane, they didn’t complete the warm-up lap and so one minute was added to their race time. Hence how they dropped from sixth to eighth. At times the Frikadelli Porsche was up to P4 in the race but lost additional time when the brake pads needed to be changed at the final pit stop.
The sister car, shared by team principal Klaus Abbelen, Sabine Schmitz (both from Barweiler near the Nürburgring) and Felipe Laser (Leipzig, Germany) started sixth on the grid for the sole six-hour race of the season. After Laser’s opening stint, Sabine Schmitz jumped in with the car in P6 but subsequently retired after a collision with another Porsche on lap 14. The car got stuck in gravel with broken suspension.
Quotes after the race
Klaus Abbelen (Team principal and driver Porsche 911 #30): “It wasn’t our weekend. Unfortunately we couldn’t continue with the same performance that we had before the summer break. For car number 31 we initially had the penalty and then, for safety reasons, went for an extended pit stop to change brake pads. Sabine’s incident with the number 30 car was a real shame, but race incidents like those happen.”
Felipe Laser (driver Porsche 911 #30): “I had a clean start but got stuck behind a Falken Porsche on my first stint, which was a shame but is irrelevant now. We’ll come back!”
Sabine Schmitz (driver Porsche 911 #30): “I’m very upset about the retirement. Towards the end of my first stint I braked for the first corner, but the car didn’t slow down the way I had expected. I feel sorry for having hit Steve Jans and went straight to him to apologize. The front left suspension broke on my car.”
Norbert Siedler (driver Porsche 911 #31): “After starting from the pit lane it was quite a job to manage traffic but I managed to improve to ninth. Unfortunately the tyres’ performance didn’t last long because the tyre pressure was slightly too high. My second stint was pretty clean as I had no incidents at all. It helped that we had reduced the tyre pressure. I feel sorry for the team because we suffered from my mistake in qualifying. I hadn’t seen a code-60 flag and was a bit too fast. Thanks to the team for the great job this weekend.”
Lance David Arnold (driver Porsche 911 #31): “I was the second and the last driver in our car today. On long distances I wasn’t really happy with the tyres, but they were stronger on a single lap. In general, we didn’t have the pace we’ve been used to from recent races. We will analyse in detail why this was. It wasn’t the nicest weekend for the team.”
Alex Müller (driver Porsche 911 #31): “I think today’s temperatures didn’t help with our tyres. Nevertheless, halfway through the race I had a good stint and managed to catch the frontrunners a bit. But it wasn’t a happy race, as we had to start last in our class and got another one-minute penalty at the end of the race for missing the warm-up lap.”
