A defective differential led to the poor performance of Albert Costa and Jack Aitken in the ADAC GT Masters at the Sachsenring, as Jürg Flach, the team’s head of operations, explained to “Motorsport-Total.com”.
Costa and Aitken performed surprisingly poorly in Saturday’s Sachsenring race, struggling with an “undriveable” car. They fell back to eleventh place. On Sunday, with seventh place, directly behind sister car #19 (Perera/Rougier), they were only able to benefit to a limited extent from the tire drama in front of them.
Flach explains: “We had a problem with the differential on the #63 at the Sachsenring. It didn’t behave as it should. This meant that the performance of the car wasn’t what it should have been In addition, the rear tires suffered and got progressively worse over the course of the race.”
The perfidious thing about the problem: it only occurred as the race progressed. This was particularly evident in Saturday’s race, when the #63 was suddenly overtaken by one opponent after the other and the problems got worse and worse. “In the beginning you didn’t see any of it,” assures Flach.
Team ranking completely open again
It was a nasty setback. Aitken and Costa lost all realistic chances of winning the drivers’ championship (theoretically it’s still possible, but nothing more). Even worse: Emil Frey Racing lost its complete lead in the team classification and is now tied at the top with Landgraf Motorsport going into the finale. Good for an exciting finale, bad for Emil Frey Racing.
“I was very disappointed after the results at the Sachsenring because I had hoped for more,” admits Flach. “We dropped a lot of points. We were 21 points ahead and now we’re level on points. That hurt a bit. The whole weekend looked worse than the performance of our cars really was.”
At least there is hope for the Hockenheimring: in 2021 both races were won by Grasser’s Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo. At the GT World Challenge (GTWC) in early September, the #63 Emil Frey Lamborghini of Aitken, Costa and their teammate Mirko Bortolotti was second at the end of the first stint.
“Unfortunately, we then had to deal with punctures,” recalled Flach. Nevertheless, the trio saw the checkered flag in fifth place. “The pace and the qualifying performance were very, very good. So overall I’m optimistic.”
Promising start in the test
After Thursday’s test at the ADAC GT Masters, he still sees potential “to improve one or the other”. However, he emphasizes that it doesn’t look bad. “I’m optimistic. Tomorrow the weather won’t be very good. Let’s see what we can sort out and improve there. But we’ve already done a lot of work today and brought about improvements with analysis.”
And how does the team intend to solve the tire problem from the GTWC race? “We have to be a bit more conservative, maybe at the expense of performance in the race. But I’m confident that we can avoid punctures. We have to avoid them if we want to win the championship.”
The Pirelli DHF slick proved to be treacherous over the course of the season, especially with the mid-engine athletes from the Volkswagen Group. Emil Frey Racing was affected at Zandvoort, among other places, during the course of the season. Most recently at the Sachsenring, the dark blue Lamborghinis were at least spared this problem – in contrast to Paul Motorsport, whose Lambo suffered a puncture on Saturday.