Porsche Cup Watkins Glen — Clean Climb from P15 to P11

Watkins Glen International in the Porsche Cup car, the Austria livery on the door, and the Boot waiting to punish anyone who gets greedy. Started P15, finished P11 — and the story of how is equal parts patience, one honest confession, and a qualifying lap I’d rather forget.

Qualifying — One Good Lap, One I’d Like Back

Two flying laps, two very different outcomes. The first put me exactly where I’d line up: P15. The second I simply threw away — locked up and botched the braking into a corner. It’s all there on the video, no hiding from it. So P15 on the grid it was, with work to do.

The First Lap — My Weak Spot

If I’m honest with myself, my starts are the part of my racecraft that still needs the most work. That opening lap is where I lose the most ground: too tentative, too willing to let people by rather than risk contact. It keeps my incident count clean — but it hands over positions I shouldn’t be giving away. The homework is obvious: more assertiveness off the line, more conviction in the first-lap scraps.

Settling In — Where I’m Strong

Once the dust settled, the race came to me. Lap after lap in the same window — no cliff, no meltdown. That consistency is the part of my driving I actually trust. While others folded under pressure and stacked up incidents, I stayed calm, kept clear track ahead, and watched it unravel. P15 became P11 not through heroics, but through discipline while the field came apart around me.

Up Front

Cao Ruixi controlled the race from P2, leading every lap ahead of Sait Emir and Shion Yanagida. Polesitter Matthias Mairinger slid to P8. No cautions, no lead changes — a clean, fast Porsche Cup sprint.

The Honest Bottom Line

P11, +15 iRating, and a clear to-do list: stronger starts, harder to pass on the opening lap, and turning solid pace into genuine race pace. Not a podium — but a good race, and a useful one.

The Rig

The D-BOX full-motion platform and the Cubic belt tensioner did what they always do: quietly make the whole thing feel real. And one for the hardware nerds — this may well be one of the last races on the Simucube 2 Ultimate wheelbase. The Simucube 3 Ultimate is inbound. Yes, Ultimate. At this point everything on the rig is Ultimate, and I’ve made my peace with the pattern.

Race Stats

Full Results

Livery design by Jeremy Kerr.