The start to the 2021 World Cup couldn’t have been any more action-packed as we saw the drivers tear it up on the tarmac for their teams. In what proved to be an exhilarating 12 hours, we were met with impressive scenes at the end where DV1 TRITON took the race win in stellar fashion. After the event, we spoke to a few teams to gauge what was going through their minds throughout the event and what can we expect from them for the next rounds.
GTWR Racing Team #1
Poised as one of the title favourites, things were more or less favourable for GTWR in Round 1, and they will undoubtedly look to pick up where they left off. Speaking to The Sim Grid, Giorgio Simonini of GTWR Racing Team reflected on their race. “We had high expectations of winning or securing a podium at least. We ended up P3 even though we had the chance to win if we didn’t crash by accident. In hindsight, we could have avoided the crash by not pressing the wrong Macro key. That would have helped us to win surely. But I’d say it has been a positive result for Team 1 and GTWR in general. So I’d call it a good result, not the perfect one expected.”
However, Simonini and GTWR have already begun scouting their competition. When quizzed on potential rivals, Simonin said, “Surely Triton are the ones to beat now, but I’d still keep an eye on all the other teams such as Jean Alesi, YAS Heat, and many more. You can never tell which one will be your rival till you meet them on track since they’re all fast and competitive. “GTWR now turns their attention to Spa with Simoni optimistic. “We need to focus and push the Audi with ballast to the limit, which is very difficult in Spa, but we’ll try our best and try to bring a competitive car even with ballast. The goal is to try to get back as many positions as we can.”
DV1 TRITON Racing
On the subject of rivals, DV1 TRITON enjoyed a splendid outing in Round 1 and have piqued everyone’s interest heading into Round 2. Wiktor Smolarczyk analysed his team’s performance saying, “Just a month ago, before the prequalifying, we were with almost no experience on Assetto Corsa Competizione. Today we’re the winners of one of the most prestigious races on this platform. If we want to compare our expectations to this result, it’s ridiculous. But on the other hand, our motivation is to always be on the top. That’s why it was possible to get great pace in such a short period.” He further added, “First of all, we kept our own mistakes to a minimum. It’s the most important aspect of endurance racing. Then, we tried to put our strategic plan in place because one of the strengths of Bentley is the wide range of pit options.”
Wiktor also had some encouraging words for his teammates. “This car is also fast at Bathurst, so our confidence was pretty good, especially after a great qualifying lap by Dominik. Although, the team is self-critical and already know where they need to focus. “We had some troubles during overtaking lapped cars, but fortunately, it didn’t cost us a position on the finish line,” Wiktor said. “We have to take a look at our pit-stops where we lost too much time. We should also improve traffic management if we want to repeat the win on other tracks. Our strategy wasn’t perfect either. I think the splash-and-dash, in the end, was something unnecessary. But that’s great as it shows we still have room to improve our skills.
DV1 TRITON seems just as wary of GTWR as the latter is of the former. “We’ve known even before the start of the World Cup that GTWR teams will be very strong opponents. We competed with them earlier this year in the Polish championship, and that was very close racing. Sometimes too close,” Wiktor added cheekily. “But when you see the starting list with such great teams like Jean Alesi, G2 Esports, Odox Motorsport, McLaren Shadow or Williams Esports, you have to be sure the level of competition will be on a very high level.”
They now turn their attention to Round 2. “At Spa, our Bentley will be 40 kilograms heavier, so you can imagine what a challenge it will be for us. Everybody knows that Ardennes’ weather likes to surprise, that’s why our test programme assumes many rainy days. We believe compromise in the setup is the key to success in this famous 24-hour race.” It looks like DV1 TRITON have got their priorities sorted out already!
Unicorns of Love
Last but not least, we headed to a team that has emerged as a wildcard this season (so far). After a strong display at Mount Panorama, Unicorns of Love has everything to prove in this tournament. We spoke to Lars Kisser, Unicorns of Love’s driver, and asked him his feelings about the race results.
“We expected to be further up the road in the qualifying. P28 did not satisfy us, even though it was not awful as well. Our goal was to be within the Top 20 for qualifying. For the race, we are quite happy with P14. We knew Top 10 would be tough, yet the distance between us and P9 was close at the end, and they would have been within range.” Lars continued, “Our race experience was mostly great. We had a few moments where other people compromised us a lot unnecessarily, such as lapped cars lapping us back while we were stuck in traffic with other blue flagged cars. But for most of the time, we had no incidents and a clean race.”
Interestingly, Unicorns of Love believe that they may have underestimated manufacturers in lieu of analysing the teams. “We scoped out the top cars as we thought we would be further up the road in qualifying,” Lars said. “To be fair, we underestimated almost every other Aston due to that.”
However, Lars insists they have already moved on as they know where their recovery areas lie and are very much looking forward to the next round at Spa. “We took way too many risks in the first half of the race. In the end, it cost us about a minute, which threw us 4-5 positions back. The poor qualifying result probably pushed us to take even more risks than we would have done usually, as we wanted to get to the front as quick as possible. He concluded by saying, “Taking fewer risks will be our number one priority for Spa, especially as the race is even longer and the qualifying position matters even less. Also, getting no DTs for track cuts will be important as the pitlane at Spa is the longest in the sim.”
We have received some beautiful insights into what really went down at Bathurst, and yet, we have barely scratched the surface. Many more storylines were occurring throughout the field, and we can only expect more for Round 2. It’s time to switch our attention to Spa-Francorchamps for our 24-hour thriller. Stay tuned for more action in The Sim Grid x VCO World Cup 2021!
