“The weekend started well with our car qualifying on pole position. My teammate David started the race (I share the car with 2 other drivers), and brought the car into the pits in P3 after 7 laps; I then took over for my hour-long stint. As if racing round here wasn’t exciting enough, while I was out on track a few sprinkles of rain fell for about 10 minutes on different sections of the circuit.

“There were lots of yellow flags and code 60s (where a speed limit of 60km/h is imposed on a section of the circuit when there’s been an incident, and no-overtaking is allowed), which is all part of the game round here, but it wasn’t helped when I got stuck behind cars who were doing less than the maximum speed. This meant we lost some time against our competitors, which was frustrating. However, we were still in a podium position in third.

“I then brought the car back into the pits for a final driver change, handing over to Christian. As is normal practice at our pit stops, we topped up the fuel, and also changed to a fresh set of tyres.

“The race started to really hot up with a three-way enthralling battle of the lead between our BMW and two Mercedes. With just a couple of laps to go, we moved up to P2, but everyone still had one final pit stop to make.

“Unfortunately, due to a slight delay during the pit stop, we came out in P3, and with just two laps to go, we didn’t quite have enough time to retake 2nd place. Although we were disappointed to not get there, we should still be very happy with getting onto the podium. It was my first time back at the Nurburgring Nordschleife for a couple of months, so this was a great way to kickstart the rest of the season!

“We will be back for more in early August for the next VLN endurance championship race, where this time, the race lasts six hours and hopefully we can get a couple of steps higher on the podium!”