Today was the day where, most likely, Last Lap Motorsports' hopes and efforts into making it to the grid of the biggest annual event in LFS Racing were dashed. And although failing to make the cut in Pre-qualifying is a morale-dashing disappointment, there are many good things to take out of the whole week's work.

First of all, good mark for the team's efforts. All of the drivers who were entered for the race did at least some practice even before Pre-qualifying (good note for Karolis Motiejuitis, Jordan Lavrikov and Rui Pinto for putting in some extra effort)

Also worthy of mention, the drivers' dedication and willpower towards reaching the goals established, even if those goals weren't quite met. As said before, the people involved in trying to get our GT2 entry to the grid did it with more enthusiasm and focus than ever (well, most of them). Karolis and Jordan were relatively new to the racing scene, but they managed to do a respectable job for their amount of experience with the car/track combo, so most "congratulations" and good vibes go to both of them.

Here's a personal reflection that I have following our results. Failing to make the cut was a hard blow for us, after all the time we spent practicing, knowing the track and the car into finer detail, trying to put up a good lap and also learning tips from more experienced and faster drivers. But again we had to face the fact that we were going for something very hard to do, which is qualifying an FX2, a risk that we took, and I'll stress this again, we chose this car, going up against the all-around faster FZ2 and XR2 cars.
But this result, more than anything, was a wake-up call. It's a reminder that you can't even get a decent result if you don't work for it. Even with a week of practicing stints before pre-qualifying, it was really hard to post a good time against the other teams. So hopefully this will keep everyone in mind of how important getting ready for an event really is.


To end this post-quali fail article, we have to thank Ring for helping us out with developing our setup, reigga for some track tips that came in quite handy, and obviously Jordan Lavrikov, Karolis Motiejuitis, Rui Pinto (and to a lesser extent), Nathan Lamothe and Ray Kingsbury for helping LLM in its attempt of making it to the most famous event in LFS Racing.

-written by Rui Pinto