B-QUIK Wins The Big One!
Dreams do come true – and for B-Quik Racing they came true at the stroke of midnight on Saturday night as the checkered flag waved over the battered and soaked survivors of the 2016 Sepang 12 Hour. We came here for the third straight year, we were looking for victory and we won. It really was a dream come true!
It’s seven years since B-Quik Racing first took to a racetrack as a small pastime hobby of B-Quik CEO Henk J. Kiks; the idea was simply to go club racing in Thailand with a homebuilt classic Porsche 944. But since then – relentlessly – we have learnt and grown up, become more and more professional step by step. We’re a Thai team, the crew is handpicked from B-Quik’s nationwide automotive servicing stores and in fact the majority went back to work supporting our retail customers on Monday morning.
We’ve learned together, we’ve grown together and we’ve taken the blows together and now we have won the Sepang 12 Hour together. It was a victory shared equally, there was unlikely to have been a more ecstatic team in the pitlane, unlikely to have been any team that was more proud.
In the cockpit Henk J. Kiks, Daniel Bilski and Peter Kox reunited for the second year in this race and they simply got the job done. For 12 straight hours they banged in the laptimes that needed banging in and they continued to do that unabated when the rain arrived at half distance and continued sporadically for the rest of the race. They were backed up by a crew that worked like clockwork, slick pitstops and a blisteringly quick scheduled service stop at 10 hours that all served to keep us on the pace.
It hadn’t however looked quite so promising on only the second lap of the race as after converting pole position to the lead, Peter suffered a right hand front puncture that cost us a lap and threw us down the running order – victory suddenly looked a heck of a lot less promising, particularly as our biggest rival for P1 was a Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo that ripped up the dynamics of the GTC class. But we fought back, we gave it 110% the whole way and clever tactics from the pitwall, coupled to blistering stints by the drivers, allowed us to claw advantages from the ever changing weather conditions.
After finishing runners up on our debut visit here in 2014 and bagging third place last year, we made it three podiums out of three – but this time it was also a case of ‘third time lucky’ we had locked out the step we really wanted and the biggest win in the short history of B-Quik Racing.
Henk J. Kiks “What can I say, I’m just over the moon. We were very well prepared for this race, I think that made a big difference for us this year. The race was everything you expect of the 12 Hour, rain throughout the night, but the pitwall played this well, we worked the conditions to our advantage and we got the hammer down. It was great to have Peter leading the charge, we learn a lot from him, and the crew was superb and didn’t miss a beat. I’m really, really proud of these guys, we really are B-Quik, they all come from within the company and they have grown from skills sets of servicing customers’ road cars to professional race technicians, able to do a pit stop as good as anyone in the pitlane, and that makes it a bit more special, we put this together ourselves and we won ourselves, we never imagined something like this a few years ago.”
Peter Kox: “Obviously I’m very pleased that we won the 12 Hour. Qualifying was very good with P1. We had a good start but then we lost P1 but got it back before the end of the first lap. On the second lap I got a puncture and we lost almost a lap changing the wheel and from there on we got stuck in by chipping away. Daniel and Henk did a fantastic job in their respective stints and in the end it all came together because there were really difficult conditions after half the race, we had rain and a drying track and we had so many things that can go wrong, but in the end everything held together and we won.”
Daniel Bilski: “First of all, I’m just so happy for the team after starting with endurance racing only three years ago and to win the class for B-Quik Racing is a big, big thing and everybody contributed and can be rightfully proud of their contribution to the team. As always the race was just so difficult to manage with the changing track conditions, rain, drying, more rain, the pitstop strategy. The pitstops themselves were great, to do a full service stop with tyres, fuel, driver, brake pads and discs in under 4 minutes was awesome. Peter drove fantastically through qualifying and into the race and his guidance and advice to the drivers has been so good. To win has been great, not just to the drivers and for Henk but for the whole B-Quik racing organization.”
