Brendon Hartley says the turn one chaos at the Bapco 8 Hours of Bahrain compromised the rest of the race for the #8 Toyota TS050 Hybrid after it suffered damage in the opening exchanges
Sebastien Buemi started the race in the car and got caught up in the melee that was caused when the Ginetta of Charlie Robertson and Rebellion of Bruno Senna made contact on the opening lap.
"Yeah, so Seb [Buemi] was a bit of the victim in turn one with the clash of the Ginetta and the Rebellion," Hartley told Motorsport Week after the race. "He had to run off the track and when he rejoined he had some contact with an LMP2. Caused quite a bit of damage to the car, which compromised the rest of our race."
The opening melee caused damage to the nose of the TS050 Hybrid, needing a replacement. Hartley explained the car also suffered further damage:
"The front nose, and also later had a damaged floor. In the end, when you lose downforce on these quite complicated cars, you can't really recover. In the end, we were happy with second because we had the disadvantage with the Success Ballast to our team-mates today, so they were always gonna be more than two tenths faster on average. That was always going to be hard to overcome, but the day didn't really go our way.
We had to change a front nose, we had to change a rear end, lost time in the pits because of that and also, we were down on downforce. That's the name of the game sometimes, I didn't go our our way but we will back next time and hopefully fight for the victory."
When asked if second place was the best the #8 crew could have hoped for, Hartley replied:
"Yeah, the other car did a very clean race with no mistakes. It would have been very hard to beat them today with the advantage they had with the "Success Ballast.
