Tincknell: “Every Race Has Been a Progression” With Valkyrie

Photo: Fabrizio Boldoni/DPPI

Harry Tincknell believes that every race has led to gains in Heart of Racing’s Aston Martin Valkyrie program, as the FIA World Endurance Championship kicks off the second half of its season this weekend in Brazil.

Tincknell and No. 007 co-driver Tom Gamble, along with the sister No. 009 Valkyrie of Marco Sorensen and Alex Riberas, have made steady progress throughout the car and team’s maiden campaign in the Hypercar class, with the unique-sounding LMH car that is beginning to turn heads in terms of its competitiveness.

“Every race has been a progression,” Tincknell told Sportscar365. “Until that stops, we’re super happy.

“If you look at the four races, Qatar was the first time we ever ran two cars together at the same time. We got one to the finish, which was pretty impressive, but we had a few issues throughout the week.

“Imola, we had both cars no issues but just not a lot of pace. Spa, we were in the points until three minutes to go and showed a lot more pace in the mid-pack, genuinely fighting other cars.

“Then Le Mans, to go there and have zero issues on both cars for 24 hours, when we hadn’t done a 24-hour [continuous] test or 30-hour test going into it, no on-track incidents, no dropped wheel nuts…

“We had 32 pit stops on each car with virtually no problems, which was an unbelievable effort. We saw cars in their second or third years not finishing. That was huge.

“Our pace was actually not bad considering.

“We’re back on sort of ‘normal’ WEC BoP. It’s going to be really interesting this weekend. But we’re really looking forward to it.

“The spirit in the team has been unbelievable, even through some trickier moments when you get speed bumps in the road getting up to speed with the new car.

“It’s the best team spirit that I’ve ever been personally involved in. It’s amazing what has been built here at Heart of Racing and Aston Martin.”

Significant gains appear to have again been made this weekend at Interlagos, which saw the cars set the fifth and eighth quickest times in Friday’s Free Practice 2 for the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo.

“I’m really looking forward to the second half of the year,” said Tincknell.

“We’re going to tracks that we haven’t been to in testing but I have every reason to believe that we can continue the progress.

“Obviously there’s lots of stuff on the car that’s fixed but there’s also lots of stuff on the car that we can continue to improve on, the electronics for example, and stuff like that.

“On the setup side as well, we’re learning every test, every IMSA race, every WEC race, we’re learning and it’s really exciting.”

He added: “The bigger factor is our collective learning about the car and the fact that every time we run, we’re learning more.

“Whereas obviously other teams are probably bottoming out a little bit on their knowledge base just because they’ve run the car for three or four years.

“The fact we’re just doing a good job between the U.S. and the WEC teams in terms of sharing information and pooling ideas and working to just keep scratching the surface on where the direction of this car needs to be in.

“If we take Le Mans for example, we ran two different ideas in terms of setups and we converged them for the race.

“We’re going to do similar things here. That’s mainly because we just got to try stuff because we’re still learning a huge amount.

“Every time we’re doing a strategy like that, we’re getting answers that we didn’t know before the weekend.”

John Dagys

John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John