Trussers (Paul Truswell's blog): May 2021

My regular readers will recall that 2019 was a bit of a breakthrough year for me, in the sense that in January of that year I gave up my day job as an IT consultant in the telecoms industry, in order to attempt to make a living as a full-time motorsports consultant. I regard that first year as a great success, balancing commentary work for Radio Show Ltd and at various circuits doing the PA, with work in numerous garages helping teams with strategy over the course of the year, along with written work for a couple of monthly national magazines.

My hope for 2020 was therefore for more of the same – with the emphasis on the word ‘more’ – but of course fate intervened: the global coronavirus pandemic coinciding with my diagnosis of multiple myeloma. The net result was that I spent most of the year under medical treatment to keep myself alive, while the rest of the world ground to a sticky halt and got going again in fits and starts with motor-racing. Where major meetings did take place, they did so behind closed doors, without the presence of spectators.

As you can read in my previous blog posts, I had to review my priorities pretty seriously, and although I was able to write – mostly for sport auto magazine in Germany – other motorsport-related work dried up almost completely, along with my income. There were times during the year when I thought that the Dubai 24 hours in January 2020 might even be the last ever motor race that I would attend in person.

Throughout my illness, my wife has been an invaluable support to me, so as our 25th wedding anniversary loomed at the beginning of May, we had booked ourselves a week away in a holiday cottage in Wales. Thankfully, the lockdown restrictions eased sufficiently for us to make the trip: nevertheless, you can imagine my feelings when I received a phone call while we were there, inviting me to work for the DRM Motorsport VW Fun Cup team at the upcoming Franco Fun Festival at Spa-Francorchamps.

Although I was thrilled at the prospect, a piece of me had become used to playing the role of invalid, and using Covid restrictions as an excuse for simply not doing things. Hands up those who recognise the symptoms.

We got home from Wales late on the May Bank Holiday Monday, and Matthieu de Robinao, the team principal of DRM Motorsport wanted me at Spa on the coming Thursday. Accommodation was already arranged for me, but still I didn’t have so much time to organise the requisite PCR test and channel crossing, along with the various preparatory work for the job itself.

I had worked with DRM on a couple of occasions in 2019, so I knew most of the team members; I was relatively familiar with the regulations and understood the somewhat esoteric culture of the Fun Cup. The race was for eight hours, with mandatory pit stops to be made in each of eleven 26-minute-long pit windows. At each pit stop, there had to be a driver change and any other necessary work carried out in front of the team garage. Refuelling, as in the 25-hour race in July, took place at the Total fuel station in the middle of the paddock, and each visit to the refuelling area had to be a minimum of five minutes.

The journey to Spa proved uneventful: my hastily-organised Covid Certificate satisfied the border control officials, and the other paperwork allowing me travel out of the UK, through France and into Belgium was not inspected. I also had ‘special dispensation’ to break the curfew, both in France and in Belgium, but again, no-one asked to see this.

Arriving at the circuit early on Friday morning for two unofficial practice sessions, I found DRM running eight cars, although my responsibilities were limited to running just the no. 2 car. A fellow engineer, William Deglas, was assigned to be my ‘arms and legs’, dashing out to check tyre pressures, etc. In return, I was to help him in the running of his car, the no. 199, a leading contender in the ‘Pure’ class.

The drivers for the number 2 were due to be team principal Matthieu de Robiano, local hero Frédéric Bouvy, a former driver in the Blancpain GT Series and Spa 24 hours among his long experience, and 21-year-old Belgian karting champion Nygel Verhaeren. However, during qualifying, Bouvy overstepped the track limits too often and was shown the black flag by race officials. Fred failed to see the flag and so only came into the pits at the end of his five-lap stint. The rules for this event prohibited pit-to-car radio, so I could offer the excuse that we could not advise him of the warning over the radio. On the other hand, the fact that all the drivers had to rely on pit boards should make the driver more aware of signals being given to him – whether that be from the start/finish gantry or from the pit wall. Fred’s excuse to me was that he was looking for the pit board, not the gantry.

Race Control gave the team two options – either to start the race from the back of the grid, or to disqualify Bouvy from the event and participate with just two drivers. This choice was above my pay grade – between the team principal and team manager, they decided that (partly due to there being 112 cars on the grid) Matthieu and Nygel could do the race on their own, so it was an early bath (so to speak) for Monsieur Bouvy.

From a strategy point of view, having only two drivers made things slightly simpler. There was nothing to be achieved by playing clever with the sequence of the drivers – it was simply a matter of changing drivers at each stop. The general understanding was that Nygel would be slightly the quicker of the two, so it was agreed that Matthieu would start. This would put Nygel in the car for the end of the race when close racing was likely still to be the order of the day.

The main job for me was to optimise the number of fuel stops. Normally, an eight hour race would require five stops for fuel, but if sufficient of the race were run behind the safety car, then the drivers could save fuel enough to get to the end of the race on just four stops.

The car (and drivers) had good pace in the race and by the time we needed our first stop for fuel, we were in second place overall. Unfortunately, a lot of other cars also needed fuel at the same time (obviously), and instead of taking five minutes for fuel, the no. 2 spent 8m 10s in the fuelling area. A lap lost to the leaders.

Safety car periods worked in our favour and we were able to optimise the fuel so that, three hours into the race Matthieu and Nygel were leading overall. We were leading again just before five hours of the race had elapsed - before our third stop for fuel, and hopes were high in the garage. Four laps into his next stint, however, Nygel was struck from behind at La Source hairpin, necessitating a long, slow lap back to the pits and a three minute stop for repairs. Fortunately, we were just into the pit window, so Matthieu was able to get in the car and set off, hoping to make up for lost time. He was back in the pits at the end of the lap though, more work being required to the car, and another three minutes lost.

By now the car was back in 34th place, three laps behind the leaders, and all hopes of a podium gone. We plugged on though, avoided the fifth stop for fuel and gained a lap back on the leaders. After eight hours, we had managed to salvage 11th place overall, and 4th in the ‘Fun’ Class, so things could have been a lot worse; frustrating, though, to know that we had the pace to win.

After the race, I’ll be the first to admit that I was pretty tired. I hung on with the engineers and mechanics while they packed up, shared a paper cup of warm champagne with the team car (the 917 ‘family’ car) which had achieved an overall podium place, and had a final meal in ‘team catering’.

I got back to the accommodation, and slept the sleep of the innocent, having elected to book a channel crossing on the Monday lunchtime. Fortunately, an even more hastily-arranged Covid Certificate had been emailed to me late on Saturday evening, and kept the UK border officials happy, along with my passenger locator form, confirming that the next ten days of my life will be spent at home in self-isolation quarantine.

Meanwhile, on the health front, I’m on a new medication, designed to extend my remission. According to the Lancet, it has proved itself to be very effective in tests. Then I have various scans and consultations scheduled for the coming months, which I can only hope will improve my prognosis still further. It may be a far cry from where I was two years ago, but believe me, it is an even further cry from where I was this time last year.