MARKUS PALTTALA
Starting out as the touring car era was coming to a close in 2000, the Finn has seen the race morph through GT1/GT2 and now GT3 guises, and broke through in 2015 to give Marc VDS a long-awaited first win after an early tyre gamble went sour. with trouble. Nicky Catsburg was in my car when the battery died just passing the pits, then Maxime Martin’s car had a fire extinguisher blow up and break some wires. This kind of stuff always happened to us at Spa. And then in ’14 we finished second, but we had an ABS failure and finished seven seconds behind – you can’t get closer than that. It was pretty frustrating, so it was like a dream come true to finally win it in ’15.
It’s always a compliment when the team puts you a little bit too early on slicks in the full wet and says that you can manage it. I did my best, but in the end it cost us almost a lap or something like that. I was on the radio saying, ‘When will I see these dry patches you mentioned half an hour ago? I’m just going backwards!’ But the good thing was because of that, we basically just threw away all caution and strategy and just went flat-out. It was actually pretty enjoyable – there’s always the pressure of going fast but not making mistakes, but when you are coming from behind it doesn’t really matter. It was all or nothing – that’s how we approached more than half of the race.
We were very fast on Sunday when the heat came up and we had the right set-up and tyre pressures for that. It just all played for us and was pretty cool.