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New drivers
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- Written by Jan Bronee
We are very happy to announce the addition of two new very capable drivers for our driver line-up for NES season 2. In this season, we will participate in the GT1 class driving the Aston Martin DBR9. The competition is even tougher in this upcoming season. The first race is an 8-hour race at Sebring taking place October 18. A warm welcome to Michael Tommerup and Jens Christoffersen ! :-)
Come-back at Road-Atlanta
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- Written by Jan Bronee
The last race of the NES series took place at Road-Atlanta. Since we scored 0 points in the last race, the season podium finish was miles away. For this reason we did not do much preparation, but showed up to have some great fun. In that spirit – my job was to qualify the car on Saturday and to also take the first stint. The qualifying-result was as expected: I was second last in qualifying, just 1/1000 of second faster that the guy closing the grid :-)
The 6-hour race was on and the start was nice and clean. The track is great to drive and time passed quickly. This time the faster class cars did a good job overtaking in a safe manor. This was not the case for one of our competitors. He made a nice dive-bomb on me in the turn into the long straight, costing him a 60 seconds stop-and-go penalty. The car was still handling ok – but some top-speed was lost. Shortly here after my stint was over and the car was handed over to the PRO’s - Karl and Dave from the remaining part of the race.
As usual, they managed to drive the car up trough the field by doing fast and consistent laps despite the loss of top-speed caused by the incident.
Suddenly the 95 car of IRDK Endurance made a small driver-error and crashed the car costing 10 laps during repairs. This meant that a chance was given to re-claim the overall season third place from these guys. All that this required was to overtake 92 car of New World Sim Sport and thus finishing in 4. place in this race. They were 25 seconds ahead of us but had one pit stop less. So we would jump them as they pitted. It was soon clear to us that they did NOT intend to pit again – but instead try to pull it off with one less stop. Karl was flying this day and started the hunt for the 92 car.
Karl was closing the gap rather quickly, properly because they needed to manage fuel-consumption. With 4 laps to go the gap stabilized around 2 seconds. Would New World Sim Sport make it to the checkered? No – with only one lap to go, the fuel was out!! In this way we took the 4. place of this race and the season overall 3. place beating IRDK Endurance by just 2 points!
Thanks to Karl and Dave for an amazing performance trough out this first NEO Endurance season! :-)
Bad luck at Interlagos!
- Details
- Written by Jan Bronee
February 15 was not a good race day for The Dart Frogs. We qualified for P4, but a procedural mistake during gridding lead to the fact that we should start from the pits. After doing a super fast double-stint, Dave was able to bring us from dead last all the way back up to P4 after 2 hours of hard work. He handed over the car to me. After a few laps, I was hit by a combination of a somewhat “optimistic” HPD driver and net-code issues. This sends me straight into the concrete wall. At this point, the car was drivable but also very slow. A few more laps later after being hit by 2 Ruf’s and a second HPD, it was game over! 2 hours and 15 minutes into the 6 hours race. This meant zero points for this event of the NEO Endurance Series. The season podium finish suddenly seemed very far away.
On the podium in Sebring
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- Written by Jan Bronee
The first race in the NEO Endurance series was a great success for our little team. We finished on the second place, which far exceeded our expectations. Karl qualified the car 7’Th in an extremely close qualification.
The race was started and Karl and Dave was able to work their way up through the class and after some 3 hours, I took over the car in second place. From here, I just focused on bringing the car safely home. On the last lap of my stint, I was overtaken, and thus we were down in third.
However, the two PRO guys took over from here and in the dying minutes of the race, we were able to regain the second place after 6 hours of exciting multiclass racing.
Here is a link to the Dart Frogs directors cut version of the 6-hour coverage by Racespot boiled down to 47 minutes.
Final results:
Circuit of the Americas
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- Written by Jan Bronee
Once again, we managed to get on the podium by finishing third on round two of the NEO Endurance Series, which this time was taking place at COTA - Circuit of the Americas. This track is very demanding and even the smallest mistake leads to a huge increase in your lap-time. We managed once again to keep our nose clean and despite the fact that I had trouble in getting a proper pace … Karl and Dave delivered excellent performance which lead to the fine result. It do needs to be mentioned that two of our competitors experienced a very unfortunate disconnect. We are right now leading the GTC class but we have no illusion that this should stick all the way to or after the final race :-)
Here comes The Dart Frogs
- Details
- Written by Jan Bronee
In order to participate in the upcoming NEO Endurance Series (GTC Class) we have formed a new PRO/AM team. The NEO Endurance series will consist of five 6-hour races on legendary racetracks like Sebring, SPA and Monza to mention a few. We are very much looking forward to these events, which are extremely well organized by the NEO Team.
PRO drivers: Karl Martin - David Jensen
AM drivers: Peter Dolmeyer - Jan Bronée
More information on the new NEO Series here
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