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2014 was a momentous year in sportscar racing, as Bentley made a triumphant return to motorsport in the Blancpain Endurance Series, Toyota broke Audi’s stranglehold of the World Endurance Championship for the first time, and Tom Kristensen called time on his fabulous career.
This was also a year in which young Australian Richard Muscat’s talents shone through to mark him out as a star in the making. Joining Betty Klimenko’s Erebus GT squad for an assault on the Australian GT championship in just his third year of circuit racing, Muscat duly won seven times in 13 races to seal the title in style, which l
circuit racing, Muscat duly won seven times in 13 races to seal the title in style, which led to impressive cameo appearances on the international stage at the Spa 24 Hours and the recent Gulf 12 Hour, where his Black Falcon team took Pro-Am honours and mixed it with the brand new McLaren 650S GT3 to finish fourth overall.
All told it’s been a thoroughly impressive season, exemplified by the cool manner in which the 22-year old Victorian dealt with the intense pressure of the Highlands Motorsport Park title decider following a costly mechanical-induced DNF at Sydney.
“Sydney really killed us; we lost forty or f
“Sydney really killed us; we lost forty or fifty points there, so the championship fight was really on from then on,” Muscat recalls.
“Sandown wasn’t the best round and we came to New Zealand having never been to the track before, and Erebus had never been there either.
There was a lot of pressure on that last round for sure, but we all got together to look at the track, decided what we were going to do with setup and when we hit the track first session and we were quickest, on the front row and won. It was definitely one of those dream weekends!”
If the championship decider was something of a dream, Muscat’s international debut at Spa had a more surreal quality about it. For a first taste of 24-hour endurance racing, the crash-strewn weekend of seemingly endless caution periods was hardly the ideal introduction, as drivers struggled to settle into any kind of rhythm.
“It was just a bit silly; I remember thinking, ‘what are those guys doing out there?’ They needed to recognise that it wasn’t a 6-hour race and to finish you’ve got to treat it like a practise session. If someone is quicker than you just let them go, because you never know what fuel load or what tyre life they’ve got. There’s just so many variables that go into the race. Of course you want to go as quickly as possible, but if somebody’s quicker you don’t have to risk everything for those two or three seconds down the road.”
But despite the scale of the challenge, having only driven 13 laps of the circuit before qualifying, Muscat was by no means out of his depth and managed to keep the car on the island throughout, where many more experienced others failed. Any hopes of a standout result in a Pro-Am class that also comprised Australian megastar Craig Lowndes were dashed by a rear-suspension failure, but as a learning experience, it was invaluable.
Unsurprisingly, Muscat has his sights set on a return in 2015.
“Spa is just one of those tracks you’ve got to respect - it’s definitely the most dangerous track I’ve ever been on,” he says. “You can’t just go there and expect to be on the pace straight away; if you do that you’re probably 95% certain to put it in the wall straight away.
There’s such a huge demand on the driver the whole time, its high speed with the walls coming so close at Eau Rouge and every corner has got different characteristics. Some you’ve got understeer, some you’ve got oversteer, some the car gets light, so you have to be on your game. The history always plays a part of it as well, looking back at some of the Formula One accidents there you respect it a whole lot more.