The main factor that decided the weekend was the weather. The alternation of rain and sun meant more incidents on the track and extremely difficult decisions on the choice of tires. The RTR projects team entered the race program with a handicap compared to their rivals – they did not finish the Thursday tests, which were run in ideal dry conditions. However, they finally erased this disadvantage on Friday. The rainy weather forecast changed at the last minute and one free practice was run in the wet, the other in the dry.
Saturday’s qualifying sessions were then held one after the other. In the first one, Jan Krabec tried to change his tire warm-up strategy for the first time this season, but his bet on a new approach didn’t work out. “In the second one, I went back to the standard procedure and it resulted in pole position,” says Krabec.
RTR projects went into the first race with a penalty for winning the previous race. Because of this, he was not enough to beat his main rival in the fight for the title – Austrian Klaus Angerhofer. But in the end, Krabec at least overtook Leonardo Gorini, another contender for the overall title, and took points for second place. The race was marked by a long interruption due to a leak of operating fluids from another car. The marshals had to clean the dirty track for a section of several hundred meters. “From our point of view, we got the most out of the race. The only way to get to first place would be through a mistake by our opponent,” says Tomáš Fanta.
Sunday’s race brought incredible drama. Most teams decided at the last minute to start on the drying track despite the higher risk on slicks. Dani Pedrosa, the former motorcycle world champion, who started the same way as Krabec with a KTM X-BOW GT2, went off the track in the warm-up lap. A few corners later, Krabec also encountered the same problem on the wet track. “Fortunately, I managed to get back on the track under the gas and took my position. But the race direction assessed this as unjustified and we were given a pit stop as a penalty,” Krabec shrugs.
For the team, this meant a twenty-second loss, which would have been very difficult to erase under normal circumstances. However, chance again ruled in Valencia. A red flag was raised just before the pit window. This caused confusion in the starting grid and Krabec was one of the “affected”. “For a while we didn’t know what position we were in, whether we were one lap back or not,” the pilot describes the course of the race. However, in the end, the timekeepers corrected the data, Krabec was in the same lap as the other drivers and gradually managed to work his way up to first place in the AM standings and fourth place overall over the course of several laps. “From fourth position, I absolutely started to pressure another X-BOW piloted by Martin Koch. Unfortunately, on the last lap I made a driving mistake and went off the track,” Krabec described the unfortunate end of the race. He eventually finished the race in third place in his class. He ultimately loses to Klaus Angerhofer in the overall ranking – also thanks to the bonus point for winning the qualification – by only one point.
“The loss is minimal, the title will be decided in a direct fight at Paul Ricard,” the pilot knows after the penultimate race of the Fanatec GT2 Series season. The season finale at the French track in Le Castellet in Provence will be held on October 7-8.
