Ram Racing’s two Ferrari 458 Italias today finished the 3 Hours of Hungaroring in 2nd and 6th places in the LMGTE category of the European Le Mans Series, maintaining the British team’s 100% record of a podium place at every round. This is the team’s first year of competition.

The result for the No.52 entry of Johnny Mowlem and Matt Griffin ensures that the lead has been maintained in both the Teams and Drivers’ Championship title chase, with one round remaining. The final race of the 2013 ELMS season will take place at the Paul Ricard track in southern France in two weeks.

In a day of unseasonably wet and windy weather, which included very changeable conditions from heavy rain to light showers, several teams gambled on tyre choice prior to the start of the 3-hour race.

Qualifying in the morning, held in very wet conditions, produced a topsy-turvy grid and bold decisions had to be made. By the time of the race the track was wet but drying and Ram Racing elected to mount the two Ferraris with Michelin intermediate tyres rather than full wets, a decision which proved to be fully justified.

A strong strategy and great driving from all four drivers was pointing the team towards a third consecutive victory but the complexion of the race was changed for both Ferraris once the first round of pit stops had taken place.

An unfortunate mishap in the pits resulted in the No.52 leaving the pits without a right side wing mirror and an unscheduled, additional stop had to be made for a very speedy fix. This dropped the car down to 5th in class – a position the team did well to recover from.

A gamble by the No.53 car on changing weather conditions in the final 45 minutes of the race, which could have paid off handsomely if the skies had opened, ultimately worked against the American duo. They too had to make an additional pit stop to change from the intermediate tyres selected while during a shower back to slicks as the rain stopped and the track dried again.

Team Principal Dan Shufflebottom said afterwards: “We were hoping to wrap up the championship here but now it’s going down to the wire and we’ve got to focus on doing the job in the best way possible at Paul Ricard.

“It’s been a bit of a difficult weekend really, which shows how far we’ve come; we’re not happy with second and sixth places! We were expecting it to be hot this weekend and the weather wasn’t on our side so it’s been tough from the start. It took us a little while to find a rhythm and pace, but we thought we had a really good car for the race.

“The team has done a fabulous job, the engineers adapting their strategy continually, and putting the mechanics through their paces with changes to the cars.”