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IN THE COCKPIT: Ricardo Gonzalez, Bahrain WEC
Our difficult weekend at Bahrain began before we even made it to the Middle East...
Ricardo Gonzalez  |  Posted October 04, 2012  
Ricardo Gonzalez and his Greaves Motorsport teammates endured a challenging FIA WEC Six Hours of Bahrain. (Photo: John Dagys)
Our difficult weekend at Bahrain began before we even made it to the Middle East! Flying from Mexico we had major delays, missed flights, lost connections, and to make a very long story short instead of 20 it took about 30 hours just to make it to Bahrain. Finally we made it hoping that our travel would be the only problem that weekend, but unfortunately it wasn’t...

We weren’t quite sure what to expect of Bahrain as a country when we first got there. Obviously you hear a lot of things in the news about the problems and the riots that have happened there recently, so it's hard to imagine what it will be like.

But once you get there you realize that not only is it a very modern country, but also that the people are extremely friendly and helpful, eager to talk to you about their culture and their history, and in general, we had a very good impression of their situation as a whole. It’s very impressive to see what can be built in the middle of the desert and the amount of growth and construction that is constantly happening everywhere.

After arriving late Tuesday night, Wednesday we headed to the track and I got the chance to see my team for the first time since Silverstone. I missed the race at Brazil and my brother, Roberto, did a great job filling in for me while I was at VIR driving for the Level 5 Team for the third race in a row which was a great experience, but that’s another story.

So after catching up with the team it was time to walk the track. This became quite the experience because walking in the desert 100-degree heat for 2 hours is definitely not easy, but this served as a preview of what would be one of our main enemies for the weekend, the heat.

So on Thursday it was finally time to drive the track. One of the first things we noticed was that our engine was having major overheating issues, which was causing us valuable power and speed down the straight, and this was something that we would have to deal with for the rest of the weekend. Our Zytek chassis has many strengths, but aerodynamic efficiency is not one of them.

Basically we lack top speed because we have too much drag, and with the high temperatures and reduced power this problem was made even worse, so the only way we could fix this is by running a low downforce package. So at Bahrain, we were running the car with as little downforce as possible, which helped somewhat on the straights, but hurt us obviously on the rest of the track, and when its hot the downforce levels decrease even more. So basically we were suffering.

Regardless, we worked hard and the team did a good job helping us with the car and by the time we got to the race we were confident that our reliable car would help us get a decent result. Unfortunately things went south pretty quickly.

Christian Zugel took the green flag and had a good start, unfortunately only a few laps into the race he had to run wide to avoid a spinning car and ran over something that broke the floor and forced us to pit, loosing four laps. He had a strong showing for the rest of his two stints and then it was Elton’s turn who as always was very good and started making up ground.

As expected our conservative approach was working and we were slowly making up positions as the rest of the cars had reliability problems.

When I got in the car we were staying on the same program and slowly moving up the grid until Olivier Beretta decided to take me out in the middle of the straight causing what could have been a very serious accident.

I understand that the GT cars have their own battle and sometimes we have to be careful, but what he did was completely unacceptable and extremely dangerous. He had closed the door on me a few corners before for no reason, so I decided to wait until the straight to pass him, and when I did he literally turned into me in the middle of the straight and pushed me off the road, causing me to hit the barrier at full speed.

He could have seriously hurt somebody and I’m very glad he got disqualified. Hopefully this will change his attitude because he has a long history of incidents and he is a risk to everybody out there.

So this pretty much ended our hopes for a top finish, as always the Greaves boys did an amazing job repairing the car and we were able to finish the race but not where we wanted to.

The rest of our trip was quite nice. We had a chance to relax in Bahrain for a day before flying home and now our focus has turned completely towards Japan where we’ll be able to have a full test day, which is something that we haven’t really done this year. This additional track time will be very helpful and should set the stage for a good event for us.

Ricardo Gonzalez is the 2011 American Le Mans Series LMPC Champion. After taking a seven year hiatus from racing, he returned to the ALMS in 2010 an immediately began to impress with his consistency and speed.

In 2012 he moved up to the FIA World Endurance Championship where he drives a Zytek-Nissan LMP2 car for Greaves Motorsport. Follow him throughout the 2012 season @ricardo_racing and www.facebook.com/ricardoracing.
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