Ahead of this weekend's Bathurst 12 Hour
race, Vicious Rumour Racing's Benny Simonsen checks in with
a Racing.GT driver blog.
For me, Bathurst is miles ahead of any other circuit. You can really
feel the history and the track itself is awesome; I’d say it’s a lot more
challenging than somewhere like Spa, which a lot of the drivers rate very
highly. The whole place is pretty special and when you get there, it’s
quite a unique atmosphere – it’s one of those tracks on everybody’s bucket
list.
For me as a personal thing, growing up and watching my brother race at
Bathurst, it was something I naturally wanted to do as well. Bathurst was like
a second home for Allan; he had a lot of success down here and a lot of people
were friends with him, so it feels really familiar when you come here, a bit
more of a home circuit than some European circuits in fact.
Simonsen regards Bathurst as a 'second home' (Benny Simonsen/Facebook). |
From last year we know Bathurst is a race with lots of Safety Cars,
so it’s a case of seeing if you can keep on the lead lap and put your fast
driver in at the end. Anything can happen really, but we’ve got to be a little
bit realistic about the overall win as we’ve got the team owner Tony Defelice
who is having his first experience racing there. But from the test days I’ve
done with Tony, he’s a really confident driver and the rest of us – Andrea
Montermini, Renato Loberto and me – all have experience of the track, so I
think we have quite a strong team. We’re definitely gunning for an Am class win
and then see where that gets us overall.
The Ferrari is a really good car on most circuits; I haven’t driven any
other car around Bathurst so I can’t really compare, but they always do a top
quality product and whenever I’ve driven it it’s always been very quick. Last
year apart from qualifying when we had a brake failure and had to start last,
everything went well from there; we were able to stay out of trouble, had good
speed and suddenly we were in 6th overall and second in class with a
couple of hours to go. Unfortunately the Nissan was quite strong, so we
couldn’t do much about that!
Probably Andrea and I will do the hard work. I think last year we did
the same lap to a thousandth, so it’s up to the team who will do what. I
started the race last year, we’ll obviously have to see what happens in
qualifying, but I think it will probably be something similar – I’ve got the
fresher eyes! It doesn’t bother me to start in the dark, I started last year
and did quite a lot of night driving at the Spa 24 as well, but it is a bit
more difficult because when you get to the top of the mountain at Bathurst it’s
not just dark, it’s properly dark!
It’s roughly like a street circuit up the top there with no room for
error, but I found that one of the worst things about doing the start is when
you go down the hill in the morning, you’re driving straight into the sunrise –
it’s surprising how little vision you have. At least the sun comes up here in
about ten to fifteen minutes, which is only around four or five laps. I
remember a couple of years ago when Allan did it, he couldn’t see anything in
the dark – I think they had quite bad lights on the car, he had to sit in
second for about forty minutes before the light came up and then as soon as he
could see, he went into the lead and disappeared off!
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