Dion von Moltke: Back on the podium at Laguna

The beginning of our Tudor United Sports Car Championship is filled with long breaks; since the end of January we had only raced twice going into Laguna Seca weekend.

These long breaks seem like an eternity for teams and drivers alike. Luckily in the breaks I was quite busy doing coaching, dealer event appearances for Audi, and also doing some nice big burnouts in an Audi R8 LMS (click here and here for a couple of cool videos).

I was really honored to go spend sometime with a good friend of mine who took delivery of his very own Audi R8 LMS. We spent four days out near Vegas playing around with racecars and having a good time.

That track time was exactly what I needed going into Laguna. As a driver you actually don’t spend much time behind the wheel of a racecar, so you cherish every opportunity you get to drive.

Pumped for Laguna

Heading into Laguna Seca all of us at Paul Miller Racing were pretty excited at the potential of a good result. Laguna Seca is usually quite cool temperature-wise, and the flowing corners of turns four, five, six, nine, and 10 usually suit our Audi R8 LMS pretty well.

Last year I set the fastest lap of the race and came fifth, and Paul Miller Racing with Bryce Miller and Christopher Haase notched their first podium of the year with a second place.

This year we started the weekend with a new shock package; it is something we have been working hard on this year. While I was able to post a time fast enough for third place, neither Chris nor I liked the drivability with these shocks.

In endurance racing, the word ‘drivability’ comes up often. With the long races being able to do a quick lap time is important, but to win races you need to be consistently quick. Because of this we decided to go back to our initial shock package.

This paid dividends right away as we went faster in our next session and felt like we could really feel what the car wanted from the driver every corner.

After our two Friday session we wanted to get ready for qualifying, but because we lost valuable track time on the wrong shocks we had to continue to work on our race set-up Saturday, which was our last test session.

This meant I would be going into qualifying late that day with no qualifying simulation run, and without a qualifying set-up.

I ended up qualifying p3, which was not horrible, but I definitely was not happy with that. In racing you very rarely have a car that has potential to go for a pole position, and I thought we might have had an opportunity there. Either way third position was a good spot going into the race.

Sundays of Thunder

On Sunday, finally after six long weeks of waiting since the Sebring 12 Hour, it was finally race day!

Beautiful weather opened up and it was perfect ‘Audi’ weather with the sun out and temps in the low 60s.

It was my first time starting a regular sprint race since 2010, so I definitely had some nerves going into the race. The mentality of the starting driver is a little different than the closer. You are still pushing flat-out every lap, but in traffic and also when battling for position you are slightly more cautious.

You need your car to be the fastest at the end of the race, so you don’t want to knock off any dive planes and get any damage by coming into contact with other cars.

In the Tudor Championship there is a rule at the official race start that you can not pass any cars in your column until you pass the start/finish line. Unfortunately ahead of me our column got a very bad start, so cars on the outside were flying by. By the time I got to turn one I was down to sixth place on a track that is very difficult to overtake.

Finding that flow

It honestly took me a little longer than it should have to find my flow, but I was feeling my way into starting a race. I was up to third place when the first full course caution came out about 30 minutes into the race.

Our strategy was to come in and take tyres and a full load of fuel. With the best crew in the pitlane we made up a ton of time to the cars in front, but lost one spot because a Ferrari short-filled their car.

Shortly after the restart I was able to pass a few cars and get up into second place, but about eight seconds behind first.

Our Audi R8 LMS was working the best it had all weekend, and I was able to close the gap down and get right behind Patrick Lindsey in first, who was driving extremely well. He pitted first, and I pushed hard for two laps before our pitstop, this is where the strategy worked a little better for the Porsche. They need less fuel than our thirsty V10 does, so they needed less time in pitlane, and Spencer Pumpelly threw down some very fast lap times on new tyres, while I was on old ones.

Big Finale

Two laps later I came into pit and the guys did their usually blindingly fast pitstop. Once things calmed down, my team-mate, Christopher Haase, was in second, seven seconds behind Spencer with one hour remaining in the race.

Neither of us needed to pit, so for us to win Chris was going to have to chase him down and pass him.

With about 10 minutes to go Chris has worked that gap all the way down to less than half of a second to Spencer in first. Spencer was able to get passed a now one lap down BMW in our class, but the BMW got in the way of Chris, which opened the gap back up to about three seconds.

Then on the second to last lap the leading DP actually hit Chris in turn nine, the fastest corner on the track. We all had our hearts in our mouths when we watched him make an amazing save to keep the car going in the right direction. He was able to just bring it home safely on the last two laps.

Overall second place was great points, and we now have the lead in points in the highly competitive GTD field, but we know we had a chance to win this race so we were a little disappointed.

There is still a very long way to go in the championship, and we know as a team we need to focus on certain areas to improve.

Up next for us is a street race in Belle Isle, Detroit. The track there could not be more vastly different than the smooth, fast, and undulating turns at Laguna Seca.

Detroit makes the bumpy Sebring track feel like a smooth European track in comparison. It is going to be a big battle there, but hopefully our work in the next few weeks will put us in a good position to bring home a good result in Detroit!

Thanks for reading my blogs as always, and if you want to keep up to date with everything going on in my career make sure to give me a follow on twitter at @Dionvmracing.