Christian Klien/Dennis Lind reach the Top 10 once in Spielberg with the JP-McLaren: Why they fell behind on Saturday and how fast the 720S GT3 really was
Places eleven and nine in the two races, plus eighth and eleventh in the two qualifying sessions: the record of the McLaren team JP Motorsport at the ADAC GT Masters guest start in Spielberg reads tidy. Driver Christian Klien is particularly pleased with Sunday’s performance.
“Today in qualifying the car was great. Then the engineer came and said that we were 0.267 seconds off pole. I was like, ‘Awesome!'”,
But then he was confronted with the other side of the coin: Those 0.267 seconds off were just good for eleventh place in 2nd qualifying! The field of the German GT Championship impressed with extreme balance in Sunday’s qualifying: All 23 cars were within one second of each other in the end!
“The position wasn’t so nice, but when it’s that close, that’s the way it is,” says Klien. In the race, however, things went better: “We had a good race car again. At the start we moved up a position or two. Then I was able to catch Patric Niederhauser. Then we were in P8. Dennis then stayed in P8. “
McLaren driver Klien believes that one more position would have been possible against the ZVO Mercedes 8 (Juncadella/Marschalkowski). But Lind’s opponent Jan Marschalkowski didn’t play along: “Dennis wanted to push past him. You can hardly get past that car otherwise. Then, instead of moving up one place, he moved back two. “
McLaren on Saturday with damaged front splitter
And not everything went smoothly for the JP squad in Saturday’s race either. They struggled with a downed front splitter after contact with the 20 Schubert-BMW (Catsburg/Krohn). “From that point on we lost about eight tenths per lap. The screws came loose as a result of the run-up,” Klien lamented.
“Then the front splitter folds down. This means there is no aero on the front axle and the flow to the diffuser breaks off. This caused our front tyres to die and from then on nothing worked. That’s why we went backwards.” The fifth place, which they had fought for in Saturday’s race in the starting phase, was thus no longer to be held.
“But we were up front,” Klien concluded. In fact, the black and gold McLaren 720S GT3 was regarded as the secret favourite in the paddock before the race, with the reason given time and again being its good top speed.
“But we were up front,” Klien concluded.
Due to the splitter problem, we looked at the data from Sunday and used the best-placed car in the race from each brand as a reference, i.e. the Schubert-BMW 63 (Costa/Aitken).
Second best top speed in Spielberg
Average top speed/mark in Sunday’s race (best 40 percent):
BMW 29: 234,8 km/h
And there you can see that McLaren was definitely the second force in terms of top speed, even if Klien still said in the Friday-PK: “In terms of top speed, we’re not the high-flyer, as the other team bosses might think.” For JP Motorsport, however, the Spielberg weekend was first and foremost about gaining experience in the ADAC GT Masters.
Further races this year are not on the agenda, as Klien reveals: “There is no overlap with the GT World Challenge Europe, but when you race in the Sprint Cup and the Endurance Cup, the preparation of the cars is already tight. Personally, I still have all the Formula 1 races I do as a commentator.”
The Spielberg weekend was “simply a good time to get a taste of the series and to get to know it as a team.” Now, however, the McLaren team is going back to its normal day-to-day GT3 business: This weekend, the 1,000-kilometre race in Le Castellet in the GTWC Europe is on the agenda.
