The Chronicles of Pfaff Motorsports ~ Full Throttle ~ by Zacharie Robichon
Time flies when you’re having fun, but time also flies when you’re busy. Sometimes you find yourself looking at the date and start to wonder how exactly you’ve reached today without realizing that the past month has gone by! That is very much what this summer has been like for me. Following our first sprint race of the year at Mid-Ohio. I seemingly had quite a bit of time off. With events being postponed out of May into July, we had a bit of time to relax and prepare for our upcoming races. On my side, we were busy planning a summer full of exciting Porsche Experience programs. Many of which would be new to the Canadian market. What made this time off quickly turn in to a mad scramble, was the everchanging rules and regulations involved in trying to put on an event in these difficult and trying times.
The Inaugural Porsche Sports Cup event, and the inaugural Porsche Canada Roadshow events launched this past month with great success. We’ve been planning these events since last December, so the team at Sport Driving Canada and Porsche have been impatiently waiting to welcome our guests for the first time. One thing we didn’t count on was having to revamp the entire program a couple of weeks prior to launch due to current regulations! It appears everything was set months ago, but last-minute changes to the program to fit within the allowed parameters meant we were altering schedules, staff assignments and daily itineraries days before the first event.
While this was all happening, Pfaff Motorsports and I were just about to get fully into our busy summer season. We had Watkins Glen, Lime rock and Road America awaiting us. All perfectly spaced with 3 weeks between each event. Watkins Glen was the 3rd race of the Endurance championship, the 3rd of 4 races over 6 hours. It ended up being one of those weekends where things just didn’t go our way.
Both practice sessions we were hit with problems outside of our control, and the race seemed to go the same way. We salvaged a 7th place finish in the end. Certainly not the result we strive for but one that we can be proud of given our issues before and during the race.
After the Glen, I immediately had to prepare for our upcoming events. We had both the Porsche Track Experience and the Inaugural Sports Cup launching on the same weekend, at the same track! Porsche had well and truly taken over Canadian Tire Motorsports Park. I can safely say that this weekend was likely one of the most stressful times in my life! Even with all this, both events went off incredibly smoothly, a true testament to our team. Not only was it our first events of the year, it was an entirely new program that had never been done by any of our team, but nobody would have known this, and that’s exactly what we strived for.
From there, I headed to Niagara Falls to launch the Porsche Roadshow. Once again, a concept we have dabbled in the past, but our first full event with the concept that will be travelling throughout Canada all year! It was great to get out with the team and see a new concept come to life for the second time in less than 7 days! Following Niagara Falls, a short few days at home and then it was time for Lime Rock Park. LRP was the site of our first professional win in 2019 so we had a lot of good memories from this track. Although it wasn’t my favourite – and still isn’t, it’s hard to dislike a track that you have won at! Overall, I would consider the Lime Rock weekend, one of “what-ifs”.
We had a very good long run pace car, and we were comfortably sitting in 4th position with about 1 hour and 15 minutes to go. I say comfortable because, although we were 4th on track, we had worked in a fuel advantage during our first stint and we’re confident we could make a position or two jumps on our pitstop to get back into a podium position. And as we know, if you can get near the front, anything can happen! Unfortunately, lighting struck, literally. With a storm rolling in, the race was stopped and eventually ended under a red flag as there was lightning in the area and the safety rules do not allow us to run when this happens. We ended up 4th, but we couldn’t help but think – what if.
Road America is next on the racing front, once again heading to a track that we won at in 2019 it’s hard not to get excited and motivated to reproduce that victory. The team is as motivated as ever and I am too.
