Editor’s note: Sean Rayhall, one of America’s rising driving talents, will file a series of blogs throughout the year chronicling his season in the European Le Mans Series, co-driving with John Falb at Zak Brown and Richard Dean’s United Autosports team in its Ligier JS P3.
His sixth blog is simple: they won the LMP3 championship, and here’s the recap (previous blogs are linked here; Silverstone, Le Mans, Red Bull Ring, Paul Ricard, Spa).
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We rolled into this weekend in Portimao, Portugal needing a mistake-free race in order to clinch the championship. With how wild the race was at Spa, this was a bit of a taller order than it seems. It was nice to have my girlfriend Bailey with me this weekend, which helped my peace of mind.
We had a lot of oversteer in the car initially which wasn’t going to be comfortable for four hours, so United Autosports went to work dialing us in to have a good race car on old tires. It turned out that ultimately was the case, and we weren’t sure how qualifying was going to go, but we knew over four hours we would be in the hunt.
Qualifying was shortened by red flags, which unfortunately only gave us one timed lap, and a few others were able to get two. We would’ve started on the front row but I went a little wide in Turn 1 which violated track limits, and deleted our only lap. Therefore we had to start dead last behind all the GT cars. That was a bit devastating, but I had a lot of faith in our team and the race pace we had shown that all was going to be alright in the end.
Nerves were flying Sunday morning, but I knew we just had to go to work and things would play out alright. I picked car by car off and ended my double stint in second place after starting 17th in LMP3. It was a mega feeling getting out of the car after one of the best races we had put together so far.
John worked really hard getting himself into the lead, but ultimately didn’t have the pace over the last hour to hold off our teammate Christian England (co-drove with Wayne Boyd and Mark Patterson) in the No. 3 car, which ended up giving us a P2 finish and the championship.
Beyond thankful to be @EuropeanLMS Champs with @johnfalb !Thank you everyone for your support and you made it happen! @UnitedAutosport pic.twitter.com/qxM1hUTfV5
— Sean Rayhall (@seanrayhall) October 23, 2017
I really can’t put into words how special this was for us and the team. Everyone was in absolute tears of joy, minus our engineer “G-Baby” (Gary Robertshaw) who simply refuses to show emotion... but he gave us a smile which was plenty enough for me.
Every single person on the United Autosports crew won this championship out of sheer dedication and hard work, and I can’t thank them all enough for the work and talent they brought to the table this year. When days didn’t go our way, we all dug in and worked even harder, and that’s what champions are made of.
She's on her way to be crowned #LMP3 champion for the second year in a row #BeUnited #Champions pic.twitter.com/yDRec8Y0CA
— United Autosports (@UnitedAutosport) October 22, 2017
Fancy reliving our race and championship winning @EuropeanLMS weekend @AIAPortimao? Enjoy https://t.co/lBacyzFGW1 #BeUnited pic.twitter.com/Vx6h1Kw7Ay
— United Autosports (@UnitedAutosport) October 24, 2017
I want to thank you all for following this year and being a part of the biggest accomplishment in my racing career yet! It means more to me than you could ever know. Oh.. and you can bet we had one or more drinks at the banquet. The celebration was mega!
Stay tuned for 2018... but I can’t wait to see what we do next.