Mario Farnbacher took part in the 12 Hours of Sebring for the sixth time. Unfortunately, a violent crash involving driver colleague Justin Marks during training abruptly ended all the Michael Shank Racing team’s hopes of victory. In itself, driving the Acura NSX GT3 #93 in the race was a big accomplishment by the team.
“The race was incredibly difficult for all of us. The car ran very well in cooler temperatures, but things got tougher in the heat. For a while, we held our position with the frontrunners, but towards the end we simply ran out of pace”, sums up Farnbacher. “Nevertheless, I must say a huge thank you to my team, who spent over 36 hours of amazing work on the Acura to get it back on the road again. It’s a real pity we couldn’t reward them with a podium finish.”
At first, everything went according to plan for Farnbacher and his team. The completed test drives were promising and the practice sessions started satisfactorily. But Justin Marks’ bad crash during the Thursday training then dealt them all a severe blow. The Acura NSX GT3 was a write-off after the accident.
Michael Shank Racing’s team worked at high pressure to repair the race car and had to miss out on Friday’s qualifying. However, by Saturday’s warm-up, the Acura NSX GT3 was ready to go again. Team colleague Lawson Aschenbach went on to drive the fastest lap time in the GTD class with 2:00,784 minutes. The trio delivered an impressive race performance and finished seventh in the GTD class.
