DGFX Racing is now on it’s 6th season of endurance racing. Partners with NEO Endurance, DGFX is one of the premiere endurance racing leagues offered on iRacing. As NEO Endurance is targeted towards the best teams in iRacing, DGFX likes to cater towards the “gentlemen” teams as well as to the professional teams that are not quite fast enough to battle for podium in NEO. Comprising 6 races ranging from 4hrs to 10hrs across a variety of tracks, the series is certainly one that any iRacing team should aim for.
With such a prestigious championship comes a great deal of organisation and interest (over 80 teams, around 203 drivers) all vying for a drive on the 54 car grid. In order to prove your worth, each driver has to do a series of rating laps – this year it was to be 7 consecutive incident free laps around the Nürburgring GP circuit at race pace. This is to prove that the driver is safe enough to be considered for a drive. The second portion is the Prologue event (basically a Qualifying race), 2hrs around Laguna Seca held last Saturday. Due to the amount of entries this was a split race with an equal amount of LMP1, HPD and GTE cars in each split. Unlike most championships though, the DGFX Prologue did not hand out drives for the full championship based purely on finish position. The DGFX team took in to account driver safety, traffic etiquette as well as speed and how the team performed as a whole throughout the 2hr race.
Team Buschfink Racings entry in to this years DGFX was to be comprised of a pair of fast Swede’s and a slow old man…. Magnus Vallström, Andreas Olsson and myself (Im not Swedish if that helps…) however it would just be the pair of Scandi dynamo’s that would tackle the Prologue.
Starting with an open qualification period of 45 minutes, Andreas and Magnus both did a few laps with the fastest lap of Magnus putting the TBR Ferrari 488GTE in 24th on the grid (10th in class). Magnus was to start the race and with 5 LMP1’s and 9 HPD’s ahead of the GTE’s the rolling start was not without incident. While the start of the GTE field was a little ragged a couple of the HPD’s tangled at T1 of the first lap making the first few laps pretty hectic which was to the advantage of TBR as they gained 6 spots on the first lap. From there Magnus drove clean and steady maintaining position for the entire first stint and importantly, only picking up 2 incident points for offtracks. Pitting after 31 laps Andreas took over for the remainder of the race and was similarly speedy climbing to 4th in class toward the end of the race. Unfortunately, Julien Bell from Graphite Racing was on fine form and passed Andreas with 6 laps to go and whilst he did collect a few more offtracks (9) a total of 11 for the team over a 2 hour duration was actually the second best of the whole event!
So would a final finishing position of 5th in class, with 11 incidents and no major issues to speak of be good enough to get the TBR car in to the main event? It would take an agonising 30hrs or so for the organisers to publicise the list of the 54 teams to make the full season of S6 DGFX Endurance, and Im very happy to say that Team Buschfink Racing made the Pro ranks of the series and will line up on October 13th for the 4hrs of Silverstone.
Well done boys, the old man is proud!
Split 1 results are here.
DGFX S6 team roster is here.