Ben Barker and the Gulf Racing team experienced one of the more bizarre FIA World Endurance Championship races for many years as the series returned to Spa-Francorchamps for the penultimate round of the 2018-19 ‘superseason’ – finding all four seasons rolling through the Ardennes in the space of the weekend’s six-hour event.
With little to celebrate from the championship’s first visit to Belgium in this particular campaign, Barker was hoping that subsequent lessons learned with the #86 Porsche 911 RSR would enable the blue-and-orange Gulf machine to build on better recent performances, and things looked encouraging when he posted the fastest time amongst the GTE-Am entries in the opening practice session. While that run was completed on a dry track, however, session two provided an early glimpse of what was to come, with rain soaking the circuit and limiting Barker and the Gulf team to third spot on the timesheets.
Despite the promising results, the ominous forecast for raceday – which predicted snow early in the morning before sunnier conditions later in the day – prompted the team to take a conservative approach to qualifying, sending team owner Mike Wainwright out on a new set of tyres at the start of the session, before Barker added to the averaged lap time on the same rubber. As a result, the #86 found itself towards the rear of the GTE-Am field, but with the anticipated advantage of fresh tyres for each stint of the race.
“Posting the fastest time in first practice was nice, but it was obviously early days,” Barker reflected, “Everyone knows how quickly – and how radically – the weather can change at Spa, and session two was very different. While P3 on the timesheets was still encouraging, we went into qualifying with one eye on the forecast for raceday and, with the suggestion that it would dry up throughout the day, we took the decision to save tyres, even if it meant a grid position that didn’t necessarily confirm the performance we had shown in practice.”
As things turned out, the prediction of light snow dusting the region on the morning of the race proved woefully inaccurate, with several inches settling across the Ardennes, causing drivers and engineers alike to rethink their strategy even as the sun came out. The track was dry by the time the field took the green flag, but foreboding skies overhead meant that nothing could be taken for granted as the six hours rolled by.
Wainwright took the start of the race, expecting to get the bulk of his stint completed in dry conditions, but was confronted by the first squall after only ten minutes of running. As conditions worsened, Barker took over behind the wheel of the #86, completing his first spell behind the wheel in the midst of another blizzard, but still rising to second in class by the time he handed the car over to third driver Thomas Priening. The Austrian youngster benefited from another change in the weather, using the drying surface to fight for the class, but was prevented from establishing a front-running position when the Porsche’s rear diffuser became detached on one side, drastically reducing its effectiveness and forcing the team into a longer-than-expected pit-stop to change the damaged part.
“It was possibly the most bizarre race I’ve ever done in terms of the ever-changing conditions,” Barker noted, “But we brought the car home with only minimal damage and scored some points so we can take something positive from the weekend. Obviously, even though it only took four minutes to replace the diffuser, that was enough to drop us a lap behind the leading GTE-Am runners, limiting our potential for a podium finish, but I think we proved that the #86 Gulf car was again capable of running at the front.
“I don’t know which weather god I’d angered, but I seemed to get the worst of the conditions on both of my stints. To get snow like that in May was unexpected, to say the least, but then this is Spa after all! The changing conditions made the race something of a stab in the dark for everyone, with strategy changes having to be made on the fly, but the Gulf team reacted well to the short-notice calls and were exemplary as always. As a driver, running in snow made for an extremely challenging – not to say entertaining – afternoon, with grip and visibility at a premium, but, with the outcome largely out of our hands, it was also immensely enjoyable at the same time.”
The eighth and final round of the 2018-19 FIA World Endurance Championship ‘superseason’ takes place at the Le Mans 24 Hours in France over the weekend of 12-16 June, but Barker and the Gulf team will be back on track for a two-day test at Monza as early as next week in preparation for the blue riband event.
