DE ANGELIS: A Mixed Weekend at Sebring

Last weekend we went to one of my favorite tracks, Sebring International Raceway. I feel like that track has so much character and challenges that it makes it fun to drive.

The weekend was a bit odd because we had three races instead of just the two to make up for the canceled NOLA race.

Gray and I didn’t have a great qualifying for the second NOLA race. That was my first weekend in the GT4 car, my first qualifying session in the series and I didn’t really understand how it worked with traffic.

So I really didn’t position myself well back then, and kind of suffered that consequence and then we started tenth and ended up fifth in class so it was a good race all in all even though we were struggling with top end speed it seemed like.

Saturday morning we had a really great qualifying effort, we scored our best qualifying result yet.

We were P1 in our class in third overall, the Toyota and BMW are pretty far gone ahead of us. So I think that was the best we really could have done. I was really happy with finally getting a good qualifying session under our belt.

Our first race on Saturday we had a little bit of a misfortune. Gray had a pretty massive crash that wasn’t any of his fault. Unfortunately the crash did a lot of harm to the car, but thankfully didn’t hurt him at all or the other driver involved.

It not only ended our race on Saturday, but also took the car out of competition for the remainder of the weekend.

The guys did an amazing job overnight to get us a car ready for the race on Sunday. Unfortunately our qualifying run ended up not mattering due to the chassis change we had to start at the rear of the field on Sunday.

I had a really good start and made up quite a few positions on the first few laps and then kind of fell into that same sort of rhythm that we had in the race on Friday afternoon where just once you get in traffic it’s very difficult to pass with the situation we have in the car right now.

The guys did everything they could to give us a good car, which we had, and in clear air I think we were one of the quicker cars. We just struggled with that a little bit and it’s super hot here in Sebring, I’m sure a lot of the cars are suffering with that.

After the first few laps, and once things heated up, you’re kind of just stuck in your position. The team did an awesome job and I’m looking forward to Indy and to hopefully change this sort of bad luck and issues we’ve been having.

I think Indy will be great. I mean, I really like Indy. We were there a few weeks ago with IMSA and I thought the Aston Martin GT3 car was quite strong there. I think the Aston Martin GT4 car will be just as great.

It’s honestly a good car at any track. We may lack a little bit in the straight lines, compared to some of the BMWs and some of the other manufacturers. But honestly the Aston is great under braking, it’s easy to drive, and has good air conditioning! It’s a very nice car to drive. So I think it’ll be great at Indy as it is everywhere else.

Hopefully it’s a little bit cooler for us to avoid some of the heating problems that kind of take some power away. But we’ll see what happens. It should be good.