2014 was a momentous year in sportscar racing, as Bentley
made a triumphant return to motorsport in the Blancpain Endurance Series,
Toyota broke Audi’s stranglehold of the World Endurance Championship for the
first time, and Tom Kristensen called time on his fabulous career. And for those who looked closely enough, this was also
a year in which young Australian Richard Muscat’s talents shone through to mark
him out as a future star in the making.
Joining Betty Klimenko’s Erebus GT squad for
an assault on the Australian GT championship in just his third year of circuit
racing, Muscat duly won seven times in 13 races to seal the title in style, which led to impressive cameo appearances on the international stage at the Spa 24 Hours
and the recent Gulf 12 Hour, where his Black Falcon team took Pro-Am honours
and mixed it with the brand new McLaren 650S GT3
to finish fourth overall.
All told it’s been a thoroughly impressive season, exemplified
by the cool manner in which the 22-year old Victorian dealt with the intense pressure
of the Highlands Motorsport Park title decider following a costly mechanical-induced
DNF at Sydney.
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| Muscat leads V8 Supercar racer Garth Tander's VIP Petfoods Aston Martin at Highlands Motorsport Park (Photo: Australian GT) |
“Sydney really killed us; we lost forty or fifty
points there, so the championship fight was really on from then on,” Muscat
recalls. “Sandown wasn’t the best round and we came to New Zealand having never
been to the track before, and Erebus had never been there either. There was a
lot of pressure on that last round for sure, but we all got together to look at
the track, decided what we were going to do with setup and when we hit the
track first session and we were quickest, on the front row and won. It was
definitely one of those dream weekends!”
If the championship decider was something of a
dream, Muscat’s international debut at Spa had a more surreal quality about it. For a first taste of
24-hour endurance racing, the crash-strewn weekend of seemingly endless caution
periods was hardly the ideal introduction, as drivers struggled to settle into
any kind of rhythm.
“It
was just a bit silly; I remember thinking, ‘what are those guys doing out
there?’ They needed to recognise that it wasn’t a 6-hour race and to finish
you’ve got to treat it like a practise session. If someone is quicker than you
just let them go, because you never know what fuel load or what tyre life
they’ve got. There’s just so many variables that go into the race. Of course
you want to go as quickly as possible, but if somebody’s quicker you don’t have
to risk everything for those two or three seconds down the road.”
But despite the scale of the challenge, having only driven 13 laps of the
circuit before qualifying, Muscat was by no means out of his depth and managed
to keep the car on the island throughout,
where many more experienced others failed. Any hopes of a standout result in a
Pro-Am class that also comprised Australian megastar Craig Lowndes were dashed
by a rear-suspension failure, but as a learning experience, it was invaluable. Unsurprisingly,
Muscat has his sights set on a return in 2015.
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| Muscat, pictured with Abdulaziz Al Faisal, would eventually finish 16th in class and 34th overall after a rollercoaster weekend (Photo: Erebus GT) |
“Spa
is just one of those tracks you’ve got to respect - it’s definitely the most
dangerous track I’ve ever been on,” he says. “You can’t just go there and
expect to be on the pace straight away; if you do that you’re probably 95%
certain to put it in the wall straight away. There’s such a huge demand on the
driver the whole time, its high speed with the walls coming so close at
Eau Rouge and every corner has got different characteristics.
Some you’ve got understeer, some you’ve got oversteer, some the car gets light,
so you have to be on your game. The history always plays a part of it as well,
looking back at some of the Formula One accidents there you respect it a whole
lot more.
“It
was definitely a good experience, I remember that night when the race finished
I couldn’t move at all, everything was sore, it was just crazy! I did eight
hours all up, one single stint and four double stints, so it was quite intense but I
really enjoyed it and hopefully it will be the first of many Spa trips.”
Still in the early stages of his career – the same
age as Bathurst 1000 winner Chaz Mostert and just a few months older than Kiwi
sensation Scott McLaughlin – Muscat has plenty of time on his side as he
approaches the career-defining choice that many of his countrymen have faced. There is
undoubtedly a promising future in international GT racing ahead of him, should
he choose to pursue it, but the lure of becoming the next Lowndes or Jamie
Whincup in the high-profile V8 Supercar championship is an undeniably
tantalising prospect.
“They
are very unique beasts,” Muscat said after sampling Will
Davison’s Erebus Mercedes-Benz
AMG E63. “I was talking to Shane van Gisbergen in New Zealand and he was saying
that even for Jeroen Bleekemolen it took a few goes at the Supercar to get on
the pace straight away – yet he can jump into a Viper, the SLS or whatever and
he’s always super quick.
"The biggest thing to get used to is the braking and the
throttle application; you’ve got to maximise the pressure then bleed off as
quickly as possible so it doesn’t pinch the fronts, but you’ve still got to
have the pressure on the nose to get the car to turn in because it understeers
quite a bit. Then you’ve got to feather the throttle a bit more because the
tyre size is half what we’ve got on the GT car with 100 more horsepower and no
traction control, and it goes away quickly if you get a little bit of wheelspin
- which is easy to do when you’ve got 750-800 horsepower!”
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| Muscat celebrating his Australian GT title. He moves on to the one-make Porsche Carrera Cup Australia in 2015 (Photo: Australian GT) |
It’s not a decision to be made lightly. As the recent
struggles of European
exports Alexandre Premat, Maro Engel and Robert Dahlgren have
shown, mastering V8s is no easy feat and, as Muscat himself points out, with
only 24 slots on the grid, sponsorship will play a typically pivotal role.
For now, Muscat is hedging his bets. After two
podium finishes in a one-off Porsche Carrera Cup GB outing at Snetterton, his
next step will be taking on Australia’s equivalent championship against strong
opposition including 2014 champion and three-time Bathurst winner Steven
Richards, which he hopes will help
his prospects of landing a co-driver seat come the endurance season at
Sandown, Bathurst and the Gold Coast.
“It
will probably be a busy year next year!” he laughs. “Carrera Cup Australia is
our main priority, it’s kind of like a half-way house between Supercars and GT and
if you can drive a Porsche you can basically drive anything. The Porsche
championship this year has been just as competitive as V8 Supercars, there’s
around eight or nine guys who can win it every weekend and next year should be
even stronger again. Hopefully next year will be a good year, but as for the
future who knows? Whether it’s V8 Supercars or GT racing, I’ve got experience
in both cars now, so let’s see what happens.”
If his
dominance of the Australian GT championship is anything to go by, wherever he
ends up in future, Richard Muscat is certainly a name to keep an eye on.
