Thursday night was the first official round of the TBR Buschy Bobby Racing League, a series for GTE cars and designed to follow the official iRacing iLMS series calendar by Nathan Amess of TBR. Based on team racing, with 2 drivers minimum for the 120 minute event, the series has a Pro, Pro/Am, Am class system – all the info can be found on the BBRL Discord channel (link down below)
This season is a bit of a test ahead of 20s3 to gauge the interest level of running a full season series, and so far attendance has been promising, but there is still plenty of room for more teams.
So for this event, 8 teams lined up at Spa ready for the 2 hour race and if qualifying was going to be anything to go by, it was going to be tight, even with so few teams. Quasar Sim Racings Ford GT GTE driven by Yoep de Ligt took pole with a stunning time of 2.11.9. with the next 4 cars covered by just 3/10s of a second, with TBR Red starting P3.
In to the race and an early dart from SimRacing Channel saw TBR Red, driven by Nathan Amess, drop to 4th before dropping further back after a spin a little later. A similar fate became Quasar after a net-code incident with SRC had them spin, meaning TBR and Quasar have some serious ground to make up. Having been gifted P2 by incidents, Kraken have a self spin themselves on L9 dropping them back down the field. Meanwhile, SRC have romped away to a 10 second lead.
Pit strategy would play an important part in the race and both Quasar and SRC choose to take a splash early, with TBR staying out a lap longer before a full service and driver change on L27 of 53. Clearly if TBR were to make this strategy work, they would need to save as much fuel as possible – and with Joris Thielen now behind the wheel the pressure to drive fast but with ultimate fuel economy was high.
SRC stop for their full service with around 50 minutes to go, leaving the pits 13s adrift of TBR. Quasar, with Yoep behind the wheel push like crazy and pit with 45 minutes left on the clock, rejoining 1.5s behind Joris in the flying TBR Ford, however with fuel saving still required, the win for TBR looked unlikely.
Thanksfully, Joris’s ful saving strategy had saved tyres too, and with 30 minutes left to run Joris sets some amazing times, eventually eking out a 6 second lead on Quasar who in turn were 6 seconds ahead of SRC in 3rd.
Kraken managed to recover to 4th spot, ahead of Backmarker Racing Razzle Dazzle in 5th and early pace setters M&M Racing in 6th.
So a decent first event, tight up at the front with different strategy’s coming in to play nicely. Hopefully the future looks bright for the league going forward.
Results are here.
Join the league Discord here
Finally, huge thanks to Nathan for organising things and taking the pics post race.