Karun Chandhok, the India's racing talent, and his increasing affirmation of JRM Racing witnessed disappointment at the Six Hours of Bahrain. David Brabham, Peter Dumbreck and Karun Chandhok were driving a #22 HPD ARX-03a in the privateers’ class at the opening FIA World Endurance Championship race, scheduled in Middle East. Chandhok had high aims, but managed to qualify in P3 and thus, was kept at bay from the podium.
The car driven by Chandhok faced a technical fault with its chassis electronics after around an hour. He was struggling at a strong fourth place and was recording competitive lap times on used tyres, under the review of its competitors. However, the technicians tried to reset the functions, but were unable to completely regain the information required to run the model. Post 50 rounds of circuit, #22 arrived into the pit to fix repairs but just after a round on track, the another driver Peter Dumbreck made it clear that the model needs some more fundamental attention.
The model came to garage to fix the glitches and again joined the race with one hour and ten minutes remaining on clock. However, he was forced to withdraw from the race afterwards. After the event, it was found that there was a faulty loom section, which will be completely resolved by the team technicians before the commencement of next race, scheduled in Japan.
On his defeat, Chandhok said, “The race started OK and I was running behind Jonny [Kane]. I was a little bit slower than him, but this was as expected as I was managing the tyres very carefully. Then in my second stint the race started to come to me – I was quicker than the other guys on used tyres and I think we could have had a good race. However very early on in the first stint I lost the power to the dash and the guys had no telemetry, which is critical for the engine and also knowing where we are on fuel consumption. We pitted quite conservatively and lost time as we were caught speeding in the pitlane – the pitlane limiter didn’t work due to the electrical problem. From then on we tried to reset but it didn’t work out. Sometimes it’s like that, unfortunately.”
Explaining the whole situation, the Team Manager and Chief Engineer, Nigel Stepney, said that the technicians were not completely sure that why chassis electronics did not worked out properly at first. The team was forced to take the car in garage to alter the control systems. He further continued, “When that proved ineffective, we had lost too many laps to score points so we decided to fully understand the issue so we don’t have a reoccurrence in Fuji.”
