It was “back to normal” ELMS business for the Race Performance after the season highlight at Le Mans about one month ago. At the Red Bull Ring at Spielberg P6 out of 19 LMP3 cars and P15 in the general classification with  38 competitors meant quite a satisfying result for the Swiss team.

Race Performance this time only brought one car to the start – the LMP2 had to stay at home. “We had quite a few technical problems at Le Mans and we were not able to completely sort out all the details one hundred percent in time”, said team co-owner Urs Meier. At the same time it is already decided that the team will take part again this year at the Asian LMS in LMP2 and is also planning for LMP3 – trying to defend the title won last season.

At Spielberg qualifying ended in disappointment after a lot of promising set-up work during free practice. A technical problem within the drive-train area forced Giorgio Maggi into an early stop after only one flying lap, which of course meant a starting position at the back of the grid, with of a lot of catching up to be done come race day.

But this really worked well then during the 4hour race. Especially Youngster Maggi showed an impressive performance and was able to keep up with the lap times of the leading LMP3 cars, once in clean air. He brought the Ligier Nissan up to P7 and was ever so happy afterwards: “What a great fight we delivered today! In the end we made up 21 positions, that speaks for itself, I guess…”

Bert Longin was able to defend the position, but there was no way for him not to make up much more ground. At the last driver change Marcello Marateotto took over and soon calculating started within Race Performance: P6 should be possible as one competitor still ahead was due to another pitstop. But these hopes did not come true in first place, as the Eurointernational team was lucky to be able to make use of a Full Course Yellow Phase for the stop, so that their last driver Andrea Dromedari came back to the track just ahead of Marateotto. But a bit later the r Eurointernational LMP3 was called to the pits again due to a minor technical infringement – some kind of “higher, poetic justice” finally awarding P6 to Race Performance in the end, one lap behind class winners United Autosports with Alex Brundle, Michael Guasch and Christian England. The Brits took advantage of a time penalty given after the race to the Ligier number 19 of Duqueine Engineering, which in the track had seen the chequered flag first in LMP3.

Urs Meier was quite content, saying that “apart from the problem in qualifying, we and a weekend without any mistakes, both on the team and drivers side. Giorgio again showed a great performance, he was clearly the fastest of our three drivers and made up a lot of ground. Also Bert with all his experience was able to keep up quite well. Marcello then brought the car home without any incidents and fairly competitive lap times.

Now there will be a little summer break for the team, which currently holds eighth position in the ELMS LPM3 standings, before racing will resume at the 28th of August at Le Castellet in the south of France with the fourth ELMS event of the season.