Tuscan R at the 'Ring
Peninsula car finishes 1000km race in 8th place
John Hartshorne, Graeme Mundy and Richard Stanton, driving the Peninsula-backed Racesports TVR T400R, finished a very difficult Nurburgring 1000km on Saturday evening, July 3rd, in a particularly satisfying eighth place in the GT Class, 22nd overall.
This was the team’s second ever international event – after racing at Monza in early May – and the three drivers and the whole team arrived at the finish to considerable acclaim for their achievement. Racing against the massed ranks of Ferraris and Porsches in the GT Class, the TVR finished ahead of six of the rival Porsches, after an event that tested all the crews to the limit.
Practice and qualifying had been affected by the rain that almost always seems to arrive over the Eifel Mountains region of Germany, and this six hour race was no different. Rain swept across the track at what seemed like regular intervals, requiring the 40 entries that started the race to make crucial decisions throughout. For the Racesports team, that meant starting on slick tyres, switching to wets when the first downpour arrived, then staying on wets even when the track dried.
“We planned to make as few pit stops as possible,” said John Hartshorne, “so that meant me staying out there on wets in the second hour. We preferred to do that rather than make a stop for slicks, only to find more rain arriving.”
The TVR’s only significant delay coincided with the first of the heavy rain squalls: either the electrical system misbehaved, or water got in somewhere that it shouldn’t. 14 minutes were lost getting the straight six engine firing smoothly again, the three drivers then pressing on for hour after hour to the eventual eighth place.
Audi R8s – the cars that dominated the Le Mans 24 Hours in June – finished first and second, although the 24 Hours winning, Japanese-entered Audi dropped to fourth after a collision with a Porsche, and a long repair. It was that sort of race: those who got to the end of the 1000 kilometres, at 10pm, in the darkness, through the rainstorms, could bask in a very real sense of achievement.
Supplied by the team 
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