As many of you know, I stumbled into an opportunity to make my pro racing debut this past weekend in the Intercontinental GT World Challenge Indianapolis 8 hour in the GT4 class. While I was not driving a Porsche, (my team ran a BMW M4 GT4), I wouldn't be the driver I am today without my time in PCA SDR, and many of the incredible instructors that taught me much of what I know today. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the club who has taught me anything for all their help in getting to this opportunity.
While there, We competed against 12 other GT4 cars, and ~27 GT3 cars for a 40 car field. Since I was running GT4, I will focus in on that class. With approximately 39 drivers, many of whom have 20+ year careers and have raced and won events such as the 24 hours of Daytona, and the 24 hour of LeMans, I am extremely happy with qualifying 21st fastest amongst this star studded group. My team put in an incredible performance, fighting the consequences of an unfortunate incident early in the race between one of my co-drivers and a GT3 car, resulting in damage to our front suspension. This set back ultimately cost us our podium, but we rallied and fought our way back from last place. to 7th in class out of 13. Racing in such a competitive field against drivers like Spencer Pumpelly, Jason Bell, and even BMW Factory driver Bill Auberlin gave me a new appreciation for how far I have come as a driver to even have the opportunity to race against them, but also how much I have to learn still. The biggest thing that surprised me, was just how dirty and rough the GT3 drivers can be with each other. One would expect a certain level of clean racing and professionalism from such a well known field, but that just wasn't the case. The GT3 cars often abused the GT4 cars, and even each-other, and constantly caused incidents on track. One Audi factory driver in an R8 GT3 decided he needed to pass me in the pit entrance, then rear end a GT3R that was unexpectedly parked in the pit entrance. Having the unique privilege of taking both the green flag and the checkered flag for my team, in my first pro race at such an iconic venue was truly a bucket list moment. I look forward to leveraging the things I learned racing here to continue helping students get up to speed, and go faster in the DE program next year.
Photo dump: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... zfIq_ozVR4
Recap video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjPu2n1N1SI