IVRA Endurance Series

No. 284 Porsche fifth at Phillip Island

by Fischer Motorsport PR

November 8, 2020 03:15 AM CET 690 Views

The No. 284 Porsche team with drivers Pascal Theis and Manuel Mayer comes away from Saturday's IVRA Endurance Series 4 Hours of Phillip Island with a fifth-place finish - the team's first top-five of the season.

The second championship round of the 2020-21 IVRA Endurance Series was marred by seven full course cautions, as there were a number of big accidents and crashes in the race.

Pascal Theis missed out on the GT PRO class pole position by a mere 0.3 seconds. But proving that the team had excellent pace at the track in Australia, Theis got off to a very good start.

The Frankfurt, Germany had one of his best races in the series and kept up with the leaders, posting very competitive lap times while the team prepared a strategy that would make optimal use of the full course caution periods interrupting the race.

When teammate Manuel Mayer took over from Theis at the halfway mark of the race, things were still looking quite positive and as if a run for the podium was possible.

Mayer, coming off a highly successful NEC season at the Nordschleife, showed why he is one of the top drivers at Fischer Motorsport and kept pushing towards the team’s goal of getting the best finish yet of the young IVRA Endurance season.

Unfortunately turn two proved tricky and through three incidents, the team fell back to seventh place. In the late stages of the event, Mayer was able to move up into fifth place, but a contact with a slower lapped car in turn two shortly before the end, will probably result in a post-race penalty dropping the team as far back as sixth place.

“Today feels like a letdown, to be quite honest. We had such a great car today. Our pace was awesome and we were super competitive. It just sucks that we keep finding trouble, either through mistakes or technical problems. We can’t catch a break.”, Theis offered his take on the race after the checkered flag.

“I made too many mistakes today, that’s on me. Pascal did a great job and I felt really comfortable in the car, but I had a few mental errors and that cost us today. I’ve got to work on that and do better next time.”, a very self-critical Manuel Mayer explained.

After a ninth place finish at Spa last month and finishing fifth unofficially at Phillip Island this weekend, the No. 284 Porsche team sits sixth in the unofficial GT PRO point standings after two of seven championship races, 56 points out of first place.

The next round of the IVRA Endurance Series takes place on December 13th at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, USA.

Unofficial Race Results - GT PRO