Team Viking claim first podium

At the recent double-header at Anglesey racetrack, everything fell into place for Team Viking and they finally got their reward for seasons of hard work.

 The two-driver team of Mark Holme and Nick Nunn brought Car 110 home in third place in the first of two gruelling three-hour races.

 The race began with the biggest field ever to take to the Welsh circuit with 28 cars. Team Viking started on the grid in 18^th and played the perfect strategy from the first moment of the race.

 “We were the complete package in race one,” said team manager Holme. “We had the perfect strategy. Jack our pit manager had worked out everything perfectly and we set the second quickest overall pit time of the weekend, making us ten to fifteen seconds faster than some of our rivals.”

 The pit work was perfect, Team Viking were so quick that they went into the pits sitting in eighth, but came out in fourth. The team’s fuel strategy was worked to perfection as well. “We went for a single fuel refuel, so we knew that we could go all the way to the finish line without needing to refuel,” said Holme. “This helped towards the end when other teams were doing a ‘splash and dash’ in the pits which slowed them down.”

 With 10 minutes left Team Viking were in second place but the Sheradize team were closing in. Team Viking decided that instead of battling them, they would let them pass and drive in their wake for the remainder of the race. This strategy was another masterstroke until the last two laps, where the Track Focused team closely followed Nunn. However, he was able to keep them at bay as he passed the chequered flag in third place!

 After the high of the first race, race two was going to be tough. The team started seventh on the grid and had a good start, but Nunn was bumped off the racetrack early on and found himself down the leaderboard. Then on the 10th lap to avoid a spinning car, Nunn had to drive on the grass causing damage to a splitter and causing the car to understeer on left-hand corners. “We decided the best thing to do was to cope with it. The time to repair it would’ve been longer than the time we were losing on the track,” explained Holme.

 After these two incidents, Team Viking found themselves down in 22^nd, but they kept faith in their strategy and found themselves pushing back up the leaderboard and managed to claw their way up to seventh, capping off the most successful weekend for the team.

 “We were absolutely bang-on all weekend,” said Holme. “Both drivers were consistent with their lap times, the car was set up perfectly and our pit stops were some of the fastest. We’re exactly where we deserve to be, we might not make it onto the podium in every race, but we’re competitive enough to be close,” he concluded.

 The next outing for Team Viking is a four hour race taking place at Snetterton on 09 June.