DE ANGELIS: Off to a Winning Start

Well, my first Pirelli GT4 America race of the season is now behind me. We had a great weekend at NOLA Motorsports Park —starting off with a win really makes me excited for the rest of the season!

There was definitely a lot of build up throughout the weekend. We had two long test days with one morning session and one late at night session.

Then on Saturday we had an early morning qualifying session and then waited until about 5:30 p.m. to find out we weren’t racing after some heavy rain came through. Not going to lie, it was a bit weird just going to dinner and then going to bed on Saturday without having a race.

Like I mentioned, there was a lot of build up throughout the weekend for just one race on Sunday, which ended up going really really well. It was great to snag the win in Pro-Am and I think we were able to get third overall.

Due to the rain, the series decided to move the second race of the weekend to another race weekend, but that means we will have to use the same qualifying tires as we did this race weekend. We’ll have to store the tires in a vault or something and take care of them!

I have raced in this series a little bit, but I had a lot to learn this weekend. In qualifying, I didn’t get everything that I thought the car was capable of. And a lot of that was just down to getting used to the series and the amount of traffic in qualifying.

I ended up having to do some defending on my qualifying lap which I’m not really used to doing!

The weekend overall was really good and was a great way to start my season in SRO. It was fun to get back into GT4 racing. The racing is really close and always a lot of fun.

I do have to get used to some of the race craft, but that will come hopefully in the next few races. The plan is to fight for some overall wins along with our class wins. So I’m looking forward to the next few rounds.

The Heart of Racing team brought a great Aston Martin like always. It is an adjustment getting used to the Vantage GT4 versus the GT3 counterpart, but I think after a few more race weekends, I’ll be good to go.

It seems that everywhere we race this year is going to be a good track for racing in this series.

I’m really looking forward to that and I’m just excited to be competing in another championship.

I’ve been in IMSA for three years now with one-off races in other championships here and there, but it will be nice to have a championship where I can almost fully complete a season and learn and adapt and race against other people.

We head to COTA next, which I’m pretty happy about. I’ve had the chance to race there before and have been lucky enough to earn a win there back in 2020.

That was also in SRO when they had the SprintX Series. I’ll have plenty of seat time between here and then though, I’ll head to Spa for a 12 hour race and then compete at Laguna Seca with IMSA all before heading to Texas!