It’s not too late to return to action

The DTR prototype was a machine that was developed to face off some of the best creations that race in the Império Endurance Brasil, like the JLM Racing AJR and the Sigma P1, but with it being a one-race machine, only those at Overboost Motorsport had a clue of its state inside the team’s facilities. But, to the surprise of many, the machine was revived and saw its first piece of competitive action in the also revived Campeonato Gaúcho de Endurance, which started the 2025 last Saturday (05) at Tarumã, with a series of highs and lows through the weekend.

The DTR was the way for Overboost Motorsport to stay in the top class, as a more reliable JLM Racing AJR basically rendered any of the previous contenders uncompetitive for overall wins, like the MetalMoro MRX and the MetalMoro MR18, of which the team had an example. Despite the promising look of the car and of the project, the reliability issues that are common in a new machine took the best of it.

According to former FIA GT3 and Endurance Brasil driver Stuart Turvey, the car had sparse private test sessions and was supposed to make a return to action, but brake issues that also hindered the car in 2019 were a big problem again.

Fast forward to 2025, and Ian Ely needed a machine to stay on top of the game in CGE, with rule changes allowing heavily regulated versions of the AJR and Sigma P1 G5 in the grid, which would clearly outpace his long serving MCR 71, especially as all things possible were done to extract performance from it. Given that Ely’s car was run by Overboost and they had the DTR01 in their headquarters, the general idea was “why not give it a go?”

It would be hard to judge how a car that was parked for at least 2 years and didn’t compete for 5 would tackle the established models, but in fact what was shown was encouraging, at least whenever the car wasn’t giving a headache here and there. On Friday, it was the acceleration not working in the first free practice, but once it was solved, it came to life with 60 second laps when it wasn’t flirting with sub-minute territory.

Then we have the race day, which is also the qualifying day, and the DTR continued showing how fast it was in a hot lap by getting pole position and staying incredibly close of a sub-minute time, with the 1:00.045 lap beating the Mottin Racing AJR and the Tech Force Sigmas. It would be so good for Overboost if the DTR01 wasn’t towed back to the pits as another headache appeared - the third gear was broken, and there was no replacement.

The part had to be outsourced to the track and this obviously cost time, but the red flag caused with roughly 30 minutes of racing gave an hour to bring the new part, finalize the repair work and check if everything was right.

Before the red flag period ended, the DTR was ready, fired up and in position to go to track with Ian Ely. It wouldn’t be a race to capture a class or overall win, but with lap time differences between the top prototypes and the small touring cars being of roughly 20 seconds, the remaining 90 minutes would allow climbing the order.

It would be a rough start until halfway into the second stint, when laps finally got stable between 63 and 68 seconds depending on how much traffic would appear in the way, as both Ely and Eduardo Dieter stated they had no clean laps during the whole race. Eventually the car finished in sixteenth overall out of 23 cars, with 23 laps down to the winning No. 46 Mottin Racing AJR, finishing barely within the minimum 70 laps to get qualified and score points.

With the unfortunate collision that took off the No. 12 Tech Force Sigma P1 of Jindra Kraucher, the No. 110 was also able to climb to the P1 class podium too, complementing what was initially a race to simply get to the finish line and have as fewer problems as possible, preferably avoiding game breaking stuff.

The next round will be at Guaporé on 24 May, and the DTR is supposed to get at least a revision before hitting the track again.