“After Saturday we heard from all sides that it was an incredible result. I appreciate Sunday all the more because we worked hard and confirmed what we did on the first day,” said Jan Krabec, summing up the first of six race weekends in the Fanatec GT2 European Series. “If Saturday could be described as sensational, Sunday was the opposite. We worked hard for the result, nothing fell into our lap, we managed the race strategically well,” confirms the team’s CEO Tomáš Fanta.
The team started to write the way to a great result of the whole weekend after the start of the first race, where a mass collision occurred. Krabec was lucky to avoid it, albeit at the cost of having to shorten the course through a chicane, just like the other drivers. Race direction, however, let all drivers get away with this manoeuvre.
Krabec, who started the fifty-minute race alone, fought with the AM class riders in the first stint, while in the second stint he was met by alternating rivals from the PRO category. After a compulsory pit stop, he was able to take first place. “By then I believed we were going for a good result. We could see that even the factory KTMs were not setting dramatically better times,” said Jan Krabec of the first race. He won the AM class and was second overall when he tactically failed to resist Anthony Beltois at the end of the race.
On Sunday, the team had a more difficult task. Krabec started the race against professional drivers, knowing that the pit stop would be 14 seconds longer for RTR Projects as a tax for Saturday’s win. “At the end of the first stint, we needed a clear track to erase as much of that disadvantage as possible. We did that, and in the second stint, Jan pulled off one driver after another to take the top AM spot with two laps to go,” Fanta described the dramatic final stint of the race. “Personally, I appreciate this result more than Saturday’s. This time we didn’t get anything by chance, the result is the result of a great strategy, tyre management and an excellent set-up, which my factory teammates also bow to in the final.”
This is confirmed by Jan Krabec. “My goal was not to let the professional riders leave in the first part, so that even after a longer pit stop we would have the best possible starting position against the AM riders. At the beginning of the second part I was fourth in AM, but gradually I managed to pull everyone back. The car was working well, we needed to be sensitive with the brakes so they didn’t overheat,” says the driver describing the specifics of Monza, where twice as hard braking from top speed is required in the chicanes.
Both Fanta and team owner Tomas Miniberger praise Krabec’s role. “His great strength is his consistency, with which he is setting very good lap times lap after lap. You can see that Jan has been dedicated to winter preparation and simulator training, and even though he hasn’t raced in two years, he has got into great shape and has capitalised on that. The second factor I see in the preparation of the whole team. Our joint tests in Portimao and Valencia also played a big role. We really played a lot with the set-up and the tyres and we understood the car perfectly. For me, the result we achieved at Monza is very valuable. Maybe the most valuable in the team’s history,” Miniberger compliments the team and the driver. “We needed this victory very much. It’s important for us that we get our confidence back, that we get the confidence that we are doing what we are doing right,” he adds.
