Two wins from two races. Our start to the GT3 Endurance series by SimRacing.club has been close to perfect, and for round 3 at Imola, Jernej Simončič was joined by Jesper Pedersen who made his first appearance in the series.
It started out with yet another brilliant qualifying session from Jernej who put the #49 Burst Esport car on pole position on a track where overtaking would be very tough.
The Slovenian double FSR world champion controlled the race from the very start, with excellent tire and fuel management while slowly extending the gap to 2nd place. Things went pretty straight forward in the first two hours and had a three second gap to P2 when handing the car over to Burst Esport team manager Jesper Pedersen, who also finished on the podium at the 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual with Jernej, Tom Dillmann and Esteban Guerrieri.
The danish sim racing veteran with 8 danish championships behind him showed once again that he still is able to give the sim racing elite a good run for their money. He kept the gap to Williams Esport for the first couple of laps, but then it started to slowly come down. Eventually, the gap was almost closed, but numerous times going down the start/finish straight, Jesper used his great experience to defend the lead. That kept going for around 15 minutes before Jesper sadly had to concede the position.
Not much happened from there on and Jesper brought the car home on 2nd place after a tough fight.
Here are some words from the dane:
“Overall it was a great result. After a small win streak in this championship the team had a great point lead leading into this race. With a P2 and finishing ahead of our main championship rivals, we could extend the gap even further. Which is the most important part. On a personal note I’m overall happy with the P2, the result is down to Jernej’s awesome performance in qualifying and the two first stint maintaining the lead of the race. I personally knew that it would be hard to keep P1 with strong competition close behind. As a stand-in for this race in a car and a track I never raced previously with no racing since Le Mans virtual in June. It was too steep of a task to keep P1 being a bit rusty. Hopefully next time I can redeem myself.”
Of course, we wanted to keep the winning streak going, but that’s racing some times. We are still leading the series by 35 points, so things are looking great so far. Round 4 of GT3 Endurance takes place on the 30th of January 2021 with the 3 Hours of Portland.
