What a weekend at Sebring! It was the penultimate round of the SRO World Challenge series, which has a busy end to the season: the finale is in just two short weeks at Indy.
The event at Sebring was a true testament to just how much hard work can pay off. Both teams that I’m coaching had their best results of the season, including a pole and a win for one of them (although it wasn’t as easy as that sounds).
It’s always nice having a benchmark going into an event. Both teams have prior experience at Sebring, which gave us targets to shoot for, like lap time and result goals. We were able to achieve success throughout the weekend, not only getting the car setups perfectly dialed in, but also seeing the drivers continue to advance in every single session. Typically, drivers experience a plateau, but we were able to keep identifying new things to fine tune, which gave us gains in lap time and performance.
Incredible effort by Farran to go from 30th to 16th!
It was a lot of fun and so rewarding to watch, because you don’t always get to see all the hard work pay off at one time. That’s certainly what happened for Jaden Lander, who secured his first pole position of the season for Sunday’s GT4 America race. That didn’t come without some adversity, though. The car endured an incident early in the event, and the Krugspeed team did a phenomenal job making repairs overnight to roll into qualifying with a car capable of taking the pole!
The GT4 America race on Sunday was the perfect ending to a weekend full of highlights. Jaden, starting from pole, put in a textbook performance, with amazing pace throughout his opening stint to hold good position before the driver change to Anthony Geraci. Anthony left pit lane battling for position, and he did an outright masterful job of passing from third to first with less than 20 minutes left in the race.
From there, Anthony had pressure on every lap and in every turn, with second and third hounding him. He stayed cool under that pressure to take home the team’s first win of the season. I’m so grateful that I was able to share in this victory with the team, and that I was able to give the right radio calls to help the drivers with their race-winning performance and focus.
Meanwhile, the RVA Graphics team had their best qualifying and race results of the year, too. Austin Dodge qualified seventh and finished sixth in race one, while Farran Davis grabbed the Hard Charger Award in Sunday’s race. This is the third time this season the team has gotten that award!
After seeing both teams get their best results of the season at Sebring, I can’t wait for what’s in store during the season finale at Indy!