Having Qualified an extremely close third on the grid for the start of Saturday's Intercontinental GT Challenge California 8 Hours of Laguna Seca, Florida based Automatic Racing and their V8 Vantage GT4 were looking to avenge the memory that was their last outing at the event last year which ended after just lap 3.

#The sveltely liveried #22 Stoner Car Care was started by team regular Charles Espenlaub, who although having dropped back to P6 in the initial laps soon recovered to run and contest for P2 in the GT4 class just behind the then class leading Ginetta and all was soon looking comfortable for the team with a car that looked extremely quick on the straights.


Disaster for the team was to strike however at the end of the first hour mark when the car suddenly slowed before stopping just before the infamous 'corkscrew' at the back of the circuit with the lack of fuel being cited as the cause. Loosing valuable time and laps to their class rivals, the corner workers were at least able to use the downward slope of the corkscrew to get the car back into pit lane under its own momentum but by the time that Charlie Pittman had got in, refuelled and left he was already three laps down.

"Pretty unbelievable and frustrating' was the quote from the cars third driver Eric Lux at the time.

Despite putting their heads down and piling in the laps the #22 car was later to receive a severe time sanction form Race Control for an 'unquantified' transgression that lost them a further seven and a half minutes whilst it was dealt with - basically destroying any remaining possibility of a decent finish in the process.


The final 'icing on the cake' came with just under an hour remaining when an electrical gremlin put the car out of the race and ended the team's somewhat mixed season on something of a downer.

Photo credits - SRO

Its been a good progressive start to the proceedings so far for the Florida based Automatic Racing team as they try their luck once again at the 2018 Intercontinental GT Challenge event from the Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca in California this weekend.

With the team's #22 Aston Martin Racing V8 Vantage GT4 again fielding the same trio of drivers as last year - Charles Espenlaub, Charlie Pittman and Eric Lux, all will be hoping to banish the demons of last year that saw the Stoner Car Care exiting the eight hour race on only the third lap.


Yesterday Free Practice and Pre-Qualifying has seen the team maintain a steady to progressive set of lap times to move into todays three way Qualifying session with good form. With each driver having up to 15 minutes of track time each but all using the same set of Pirelli control tyre it wasn't surprising to see everyones lap times drop off to form a collective time that would then be averaged out between the three drivers.

Espenlaub was the quickest of the three thanks to the fresh rubber but their collective time was just 0.033 of a second off to miss out on a front row start in the GT4 class in tomorrows race - instead they shall start behind the #51 Panoz Avezzano in P1 and the Murillo Racing Mercedes in P2.

Like any endurance race - eight hours is a long time at any circuit!

Good luck to the team.

Photo credits - Intercontinental GT Challenge