Nogaro 8hrs Fun Cup : The Pace Was There…… But Not The Luck

“During practice and qualifying we were around the top 16 out of the 57 entries and pulled out third place in the reverse grid,” said Holme.

Kingsnorth took the opening stint, but started to lose ground from their second row start. He was out of the top 10 by lap four and had slipped to 27^th after 10 laps, but the first stop was made after 16 laps under a full course yellow.

Holme brought them back into eighth after the first hour, 1m13 s off the lead. For a while they continued to climb the order and two hours in they had gone a lap down on the lead, but were up to seventh.

“It was an up and down sort of race, with tactics and the different fuel strategies, ours was proving to be very good and we were doing well,” Holme added.

They were 17^th after the third hour, but after slipping out of the top 20 again, Holme was caught up in an incident that was to cost them dearly.

“It was into the fifth hour there were two cars in front, the first one missed the pit entrance and the other went sideways right in front of me to avoid him. I had nowhere to go and hit him hard, and the impact damaged our radiator,” he explained.

They lost 11 laps before rejoining, dropping them to 37^th as they started the penultimate hour.

“We still went well but had to run without a splitter, so for the rest of the race we suffered terrible understeer. But the car had been good, our pace could have got us a top five, Aaron and Graham our mechanics and Alexis our team manager were great, so we still enjoyed it,” Holme concluded.