LAMBORGHINI IRON LYNX COMPLETES TOUGH 6-HOUR COTA RACE

The FIA World Endurance Championship completed its comeback at Circuit of The Americas today with a tough six-hour run in scorching weather conditions. Lamborghini Iron Lynx wrapped up the Lone Star Le Mans event in P14 after a hard-fought run that saw drivers manage many variables starting from heat exhaustion.
 
Edoardo Mortara took the opening stint with the #63 car and delivered an incredible start, moving up to the top 10 in just one lap. After that, he had an extremely competitive run, although a five-second penalty for a pass outside the track limits led to a drop in position.

Mirko Bortolotti took the reins for the second stint and the rotation continued with Daniil Kvyat, who capped off a promising first half of the race in full hunt for the top 12 positions. Unfortunately, two further penalties compromised the chance to finish a bit up the order.
 
In the final stint, Kvyat pushed hard to improve the position but eventually had to settle for P14.

Coming from a tough qualifying session on Saturday, the Lamborghini SC63 racecar and its drivers made up some ground on race pace, running smoothly despite the hostile environment.
 
For WEC, the event was a success, with a packed house of more than 65.000 fans throughout the weekend. The series is already set for another iconic round, the 6 Hours of Fuji, in two weeks.

We are moving forward in our learning year and even at Circuit of The Americas, we continued to make steps, keeping the trend we have had since the start of the season. We are still struggling proportionally a bit more in qualifying trim, while in the race we are definitely closer to the front even though there’s obviously a lot of work ahead. We knew that the heat would have been an issue here, and our drivers and crew did an amazing job working in such hard conditions. We are looking forward to the next round at Fuji to carry on the work and improvement.

Emmanuel Esnault, Racing Director

I think we really showed our fighting spirit today as a team, and that’s great. Very tough race. We still have things to tidy up around the car and we will keep working on it as we gather information, sometimes at the expense of being a bit too hot inside the cockpit. Anyway, it’s a part of life and a part of racing. We will make adjustments for the future hot races. I was happy with my qualifying lap, as it was close to some of our competitors, but that’s our gap at the moment. In the race, we are a little more on the pace. There are moments when we can be as competitive as the others and sometimes even get a bit of an edge, but it doesn’t last long. We know that when we will bring upgrades in the area we need to improve, we will make a huge step forward.

Daniil Kvyat

We just completed the 6 Hours of COTA, another race we have finished. Not the result we wanted as we expected to be slightly more competitive here, but still, there were some positives. We had a very good start, we managed to pass quite a lot of cars and we were fighting for the 10th position. Unfortunately, a couple of mistakes during the race cost us a few seconds. The goal for us in the next race will be to tidy up everything, execute the race more precisely and try to extract more performance from the car. There is still a little bit more to get out of it, and slowly but surely we are heading in that direction.

Edoardo Mortara

I think it’s generally been a tough weekend, but we managed to reach the minimum goal to finish the race without issues in very demanding conditions. It has been a really really hot weekend, and it put us to our limits, the team, the car, and obviously the drivers inside the cockpit. I’m happy that we managed a solid run, yet on the performance side, we are still struggling quite a bit. There is a lot of work ahead of under that point of view.

Mirko Bortolotti