Octane Esports Racing

Octane Debut

This weekend(15-16/02/2025) marked a big milestone in Octane Esports history, our first racing weekend. Across 2 days we completed 3 races throughout the weekend, 6 hours of daytona, GT challenge around Paul Ricard and another 6 hour race around Paul Ricard

PHRL 6 hours of daytona

The PHRL 6 hours of Daytona race was driven by Arthur Bellen and Lorenzo Hendriksz, Max Kitt fell out due to sickness. The car used for this race was the Cadillac GTP, the mods were from TRR (The Racing Rats).

From practice on we knew we had a good shot at a nice result, this was made true in the qualifying session where Arthur managed to take pole with a lap time of 1.29.096. This lap time beat our nearest competitor OC racing by 0.025 seconds.

Arthur started the race but lost the lead on the first lap, the soft cold tires used by P2 got the jump on our team due to being the qualifying tire. Later on in the first hour the soft colds started to drop off giving Arthur the chance to get the jump the competitor and after a battle of about 2 and a half laps Arthur was able to keep the lead, the rest of the stint Arthur saved fuel and managed the tires to keep P1. A red flag came out later due to driver swaps and long stops not working thus giving us P1 on the restart again, a slight tap on our rear wing gave us the jump to keep the lead for the rest of the stint until it was time to hand the car to Lorenzo.

Tragedy struck sadly and Lorenzo couldn’t join thus forcing Arthur to do a 3rd hour, it lost us quite some time in the end but we kept on pushing. Once the third hour was done Arthur handed the car to Lorenzo successfully and Lorenzo pushed through the final 3 hours and he was able to get the car over the line in P3. This makes Lorenzo and Arthur the drivers that got Octane’s first podium..

ARC GT challenge around Paul Ricard

The ARC Paul Ricard race was supposed to be a week earlier but car issues postponed the race. With Mathew Webb, Matt Skoro and Andronikos Tsemekidis competing for the main team and junior team in the Audi GT3 Car.

Qualifying got us on the front row with Mathew securing a P2 with a lap time of 1.54.976. Further down the grid Matt secured P7 with a lap time of 1.56.274, Andronikos was down in P17.

The race went well with Mathew fighting for the lead but eventually having to settle for P3, he fought very hard but the winning car managed to not pit and the DART driver in P2 had better timing for a pit stop putting him more in front. Matt Skoro's race went very well for his first outing in a GT, fighting a lot throughout the race, defending overtaking to settle for P7.

This race marked the first competitive race for Andronikos in the junior car. The race engineer from other races finished P14 after a few crashes but really showed what he was capable of in the end. Octane will be coming back next week in Indianapolis with more drivers to fight for more points

CRL 6 Hours of Paul Ricard

This race was the most difficult one, we had 2 entries; A hypercar driven by Sebastien Waters and Matt Skoro and a LMP2 driven by Mathew Webb and Arthur Bellen. The Hypercar qualified last and the LMP2 qualified P6 in class on a grid of 12 LMP2 cars.

The race was difficult and had quite some incidents, the LMP2 car sadly caused a full course yellow due to accidentally spinning out a higher class car. The car had a 10 second penalty due to starting too quickly under the full course yellow but it didn't affect us. Due to the low amount of corner cuts we counted one drive through in total which is the least in class with every other car having a minimum of 2 drive throughs.

The LMP2 stayed in its position and finished P6 in class with 7 cars surviving the race.

The hypercar sadly was caught up in quite some incidents with a GT3 swerving into them on the long back straight resulting in broken suspension and thus a big time loss. Sebastien managed to unlap himself from all the LMP2 cars but sadly another hypercar rejoined in a super dangerous manner on a fast section killing sebastien’s engine forcing us to retire our hypercar.

Conclusion

In the team's first racing weekend we are happy to have managed 2 podiums and a pole and we hope to achieve more of that in the future. Our next racing weekend (1-2/03/25) takes place in the states. We will have a prologue race of 4 hours around Daytona in the RMP league and the GT series from ARC around indianapolis. We are hoping for some beautiful results for everyone so we hope to see you there!