An early race penalty hampered Krohn Racing’s hopes of a podium result in the Six Hours of Sao Paulo.
An engine change in qualifying resulted in a stop-and-go penalty being handed to the Ferrari F458 of Tracy Krohn, Nic Jonsson and Maurizio Mediani, meaning that a top five finish was the best the team could muster at the end of the six hour race.
Maurizio began the race from sixth, although dropped down to eighth as a result of the penalty during his opening double stint, before handing the car over to Krohn, who alternated hour-long stints with Jonsson.
“It was nice to finish,” said team owner and driver, Krohn. “We were very disappointed at the start of the race to get a penalty. I wasn’t aware of that in the rules book. Our engine tuner, Michelotto, decided that we needed to change engines because we had an issue. The one we were using was the one I crashed with in practice at Le Mans. After we had an extremely long parque ferme last night, they were running the engine and noticed a very pronounced noise coming out of the top of the engine. Michelotto told us we needed to change the engine, which we did, based on their recommendation. I guess that wasn’t a good enough explanation for the FIA. The rules are that if you change engines you have a three minute penalty stop-and-go, however there is some language for force majeure that provides for things you can’t forsee. This was an engine that was involved in a wreck before and we kept it. Probably in retrospect we should have changed it then but we’ll get to the bottom of that later on. I’m not quite sure how to manage this going forward but I can tell you that we’ve got to run it for the rest of the season.
“Having said all that, I feel like everyone else drove really well. I drove well. I had a little ergonomic issue early on in the race which caused me to spin. Other than that we ran very well and the race was pretty non-eventful for us, except for the stop-and-go penalty. Nic and Maurizio did their normal stellar job driving the car and I felt like I was reasonably competitive with the other Am drivers. We look forward to hopefully coming back here next year.”
