Spa 🇧🇪

British GT heading to Spa-Francorchamps is one of the highlights of the calendar, and this one had an extra edge for me — it was my first time at the circuit, and my third weekend race engineering for Innovation Racing after Silverstone and Oulton.

Saturday: great developments across the board

Great developments by all throughout the weekend. The team put it P4 on the grid, and the pace was genuinely there.

It could have been slightly more had a few things rolled our way. That's Spa, the lap is so long and so committed that a single compromised sector, or one badly timed piece of traffic, is worth more time than at almost anywhere else we go. You can do everything right and still find the lap wasn't the one you had in you.

But the underlying pace looked good, the drivers were comfortable, and P4 at a circuit none of us had a big bank of data for was a solid platform to start from.

Seeing it for the first time

It's been great being at the track for the first time.

Everyone tells you about Eau Rouge and Raidillon, and it does earn every bit of the reputation, the elevation genuinely doesn't come across on TV or in the sim. I absolutely loved the vibe of being in the forest, it's such a unique environment for a circuit to be placed in.

Engineering a race there is a different exercise for exactly that reason. Information arrives in bigger, slower chunks. You have longer to think, and less opportunity to correct something once it's in motion.

The race

We had a great start, but unfortunately struggled in the second stint.

That's the honest summary. The opening phase went to plan, and then the second stint didn't come to us in the way the first one did. There's a lot to go away and look at in the data, and that work is genuinely the most valuable part of a weekend like this — a race that doesn't go your way tends to teach you more than one that does, provided you actually do the review properly.

Staying on in Belgium

I also stayed out in Belgium for the GTWC Spa 24 the following weekend for a short while. I didn't catch the race itself, but the build-up was really good, seeing the paddock fill up for a 24-hour race is a different thing entirely, and the whole place has an atmosphere to it that's hard to describe until you've stood in it.

It's also a useful reminder of where all of this is pointed. Endurance racing at that level is the goal, and being on the ground at events like that keeps the target concrete rather than abstract.

Thank you

Thanks as always to everyone at Innovation Racing for another weekend on the wall, and to @contentbyarnold and @sam.williams_media for the photography and content across the weekend.

Onwards. 💚