To walk into the Nexus Infinity garage at the conclusion of the opening round of the Asian Le Mans Series at Fuji in Japan, you could have been forgiven for believing the Malaysian-based team had taken victory in the hotly contested GT class, with all the wide smiles, high-fives and back slapping..

The reality was, that despite at one point running comfortably second and in the top five outright amongst the much faster prototype cars, the team fell down the order mid-race with a string of ‘self-inflicted’ tyre failures.

Despite that, and the relative lack of experience from some of the new crew brought into the event to assist with the many logistical elements of an endurance race, the team were overjoyed to have been so competitive, and overcome a variety of challenges across the two-hour race to record a seventh placed finish.

After qualifying sixth, Hong Kong’s Dominic Ang started and was quickly into a rhythm, moving the Nexus Infinity Ferrari 458 into second place behind the pace-setting McLaren of three-time GT Asia Series champion Mok Weng Sun.

Ang concentrated on consistency, with plans to complete a double-stint before handing over to his experienced Australian team-mate Josh Hunt, however before they could apply their pre-race strategy, tyre failure crept into the equation, effectively ruling the team out of contention.

“The race started off really well, although we didn’t qualify as well as we would have liked,” Josh Hunt explained.

“That said, we learnt an awful lot about the car in the process which was good. Dom [Ang] started and got up to second and was just following Mok around in the McLaren, which was actually helpful because it gave us a chance to see where the McLaren was strong.

“Dom was doing a great job, he was just sitting there comfortably, doing everything he needed to do, then we suddenly had a tyre failure on the front left. Effectively it was as a result of us being a little bit greedy on the kerbs. Initially we wondered if it was a tyre issue – which it wasn’t, then we thought it might have been a car setup issue – which it wasn’t, then we discovered that we were using a bit too much of the kerb.

“As a result of the first failure we decided to drop the idea of double stinting, so I jumped in to get a bit of data and knowledge about the car ahead of Sepang.

“I started my stint knowing what had happened with the tyre, but made a mistake at turn two on about the tenth of my laps – I got caught a little bit wide and thrown onto the inside of the kerb, and it just pinched the inside of the tyre again, so failure number two. It was a pretty exciting ride at around 260kph when it let go!

“We might not have found the pace we wanted in qualifying, but we had a good race pace, and the pace was consistent between us, we just came good at the wrong end of the weekend.

“The car was undamaged, so we put new tyres back on and got stuck in again and just focussed on learning as much as we could about the car. It still wasn’t exactly where we wanted it to be, but it was consistent.

“So all-in-all, as a new team, with a new track for us, we’re pretty happy with how things played out and what we’ve learned. We would have loved to have been on the podium.. We didn’t have the pace of the McLaren, but I think we had a really good chance of second or third and it’s disappointing that we didn’t get to that, especially with coming all this way, and with all the preparation that the team had put into it, but we finished, and that was the first goal.

“We took a lot out of the experience we had with the Fuji circuit, so that was invaluable. We’re likely to move to three drivers in future events with car-owner Adrian D’Silva joining us. With Fuji being the shortest event on the program, we took this opportunity for Dom and I to extract the most we could from the car to give us a foundation to work from moving on to the next event in Sepang, so I think moving forward, especially on our home circuit, we’ll be able to really push the points leaders and work our way back into the championship equation.”

The next event for the Nexus Infinity team will be the second round of the Asian Le Mans Series at Sepang in Kuala Lumpur in one months time [7-8 November] for the first of the three-hour endurance races.