Ferdinand Habsburg says that Team WRT completed a remarkable turnaround to win the Six Hours of Bahrain after the team was significantly off pace in the opening practice session.
Habsburg, Robin Frijns and Charles Milesi won their second race of the season and clinched the LMP2 points lead in the process during the first round of the season-ending Bahrain double header.
The result on Saturday night was completely different compared to the results of the opening free practice session on Thursday, when the Belgian team found themselves over a second off the pace compared to title rivals JOTA.
The team worked on the car after that and made setup changes, allowing them to extract greater pace from the car, ultimately leading to victory. But even with that in mind, Habsburg admitted that hopes for victory after the first practice session were slim.
Never, never thought that that would happen,” he told MotorsportWeek.com “I’ve never experienced such a pace deficit, being so lost, and then turning it around like that. It’s completely insane to me. But we stuck together I guess.”
With the win, Team WRT now takes the championship lead from JOTA, who finished second. Although the title battle is a big part of the Bahrain double header, Habsburg believes the team’s success was partially the result of the team’s focus on the individual race, rather than the points tally.
“You always try to win the race. Everybody’s going to be thinking about the championship. Of course, we know we need to win the race but I think the reason why we won is because we just let go of that, focused, put our heads together, put the priorities in the right order and the result is the result.”
“We had a good time. We enjoyed it. It was a good race for us. I had a good time driving.”
Habsburg think that next week’s title decider will be an even greater challenge, as rivals JOTA will now be extra motivated to improve further.
“We’ve just got to do the same next week. I think that our competitors are going to improve a lot. They’re going to sit back and really look at what what went wrong, where they can find more pace.
“And we’re going to do the same. I think that there’s still something in it for us. There’s potential for improvement. And we just got to keep punching.”
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