by Chris Hayes
Farnbacher Loles Racing earned a top-five GT2 finish in the American Le Mans Series race at Long Beach despite a bizarre battle with an ice box used to cool the drivers' suits.
Australian Alex Davison was at the helm of the team's Porsche 911 GT3 RSR in the opening stint when halfway into the race the car's ice box became loose in the car.
The box hit the car's ignition switch several times, cutting the engine power, and also stopped radio communication, leaving Davison unable to alert the team to the problem.
"It was flying around all over the cockpit, hitting up to the windscreen, over on my lap and just smashing into everything," the Australian explained.
"Four or five times, it switched the ignition off. At the same time, all the water had leaked out of the box and was leaking out of the car and going on the tyres. Two times when the car stopped, another car hit me from behind.
"I thought, 'This is dangerous. We're going to get taken out,' so I came in the pits. But the cool box whacking into the radio must have done something, so we had no communication."
To Davison's dismay and despite his best efforts to alert the team, the cool box remained in the car as Besseng left the pit-lane.
"I came in and jumped out and I signalled - held the cool box up - and I thought the guys saw it, but by the time I got back to the pits, I realised Marc had driven off and it was still in there. It's a pity because we ended up stopping under green and it cost us two positions."
Basseng dropped to 13th and lost a lap under a cautionary period, but he managed to fight his way to a superb fifth place despite further problems with the cool box.
Amazingly, while carving his way through the field Basseng continued to wrestle with the box and eventually resorted to hurling it out of the cockpit.
"The cool box got loose in the car, so I was fighting with a 10-kilogram [22-pound] cool box during the safety car," explained the German after his ordeal was over.
