Over the last six years or so, Jeroen Bleekemolen has established himself as one of the hardest-working race drivers in the world. On a given weekend, you can find the Dutch driver racing just about any GT car anywhere in the world and while he has a class win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and a couple of Porsche Supercup titles on his resume, Bleekemolen’s high-profile drives in the now-defunct American Le Mans Series went a long way to put him on the map. In 2011, he split a GTC class Porsche with Black Swan Racing owner Tim Pappas, helping Pappas to the drivers’ championship with four wins. One of those wins at the first Baltimore Grand Prix came with a bizarre sequence that remain forever ingrained in many ALMS fans’ memories.
During qualifying, his Porsche’s front-left tire sheared completely off the hub, but Bleekemolen recognized the wheel trying to leave and managed to run it into the runoff area right by pitlane before the wheel sauntered out of the wheel-well. He navigated the tire-stack slalom at comically slow speed and, after stopping clear of the tires, to everyone’s amazement he sprinted back through the tire stack to retrieve his errant wheel. With each team only allocated one set of tires for qualifying, it was important for Bleekemolen to bring back that one wheel so that if the hub was fixable, the wheel could be reused and he could set a qualifying time. He limped the three-wheeled Porsche back to pitlane and, as it turns out, the Black Swan crew could fix the hub so Bleekemolen could set the class pole. On the narrow streets of the Baltimore circuit, that meant a huge advantage in the class; Bleekemolen and Pappas stormed off to the GTC win from pole. That’s a hell of a hard-working driver.
Surely, I can’t be alone in thinking: “There must be some way to add this in to racing somehow as a planned event.” You know, like a classic Le Mans start but with some tire rolling. Don’t worry, I’ve already opened up the ol’ notebook and started to draft rules for this new racing.
Simple rule change.
Drivers must do the re-fuel, tire change and minor service work in pit lane themselves.
YES! I like this idea. Self-service endurance racing.