Osborne Motors Endurance Challenge /// S14
There are cleaner ways to win a championship.
You can build a lead early, manage it carefully, and spend the final race behaving like a person carrying an open cup of coffee across a freshly cleaned floor. You can avoid trouble. You can keep the car pointed in the correct direction. You can know exactly what is required of you.
Or you can arrive at Le Mans with a narrow advantage, spin a difficult Ford Mustang GT3 more than once, finish fourth, and discover afterward that an entire season has ended in a tie.
Nicholas Maynard and Dan Griffin each finished OMEC Season 14 with 719 points.
Not close to each other. Not separated by a point. Exactly even.
On race-finish points alone, Maynard had edged Griffin by the smallest useful margin: 711 to 710. Griffin earned nine safety bonuses during the season to Maynard’s eight, pulling himself level and sending the championship to a tiebreaker. Maynard won six races. Griffin won five.
Clean driving turned Griffin’s one-point loss into a tie. Maynard’s extra victory broke it again.
It was an appropriately ridiculous ending to a season in which a HundredForce driver won all 12 races on the OMEC GT3 calendar.
Shared Work
Season 14 was Maynard and Griffin’s third OMEC campaign. It was also a return to where their partnership began.
The two met during OMEC Season 11 and became teammates late that year. Maynard won the PRO championship that season, then won again in Season 13 after the team sat out Season 12’s mixed-class format. Griffin entered the new season as the obvious threat to Maynard’s title defense. New HundredForce driver Casey Jones was the wildcard: still settling into the team, but carrying enough pace to make himself difficult to ignore.
Maynard and Griffin both drove the Mustang GT3. They shared setups, compared notes, and developed the car together throughout the season, even as the championship tightened around them.
“Our driving styles aren’t miles apart, but the Mustang showed some strengths and weaknesses of both of us a bit more dramatically than other cars we have shared in the past,” Griffin said. “But at the end of the day, we are a team trying to get better together, and that requires communication and sharing information.”
A championship fight between teammates can create strange incentives. Every useful discovery is also information handed directly to the person trying to beat you.
Maynard’s view was simpler.
“Iron sharpens iron, right?”
The Opening Punch
Griffin began the season with three consecutive victories: Miami, Virginia International Raceway, and Road America.
Maynard was quick from the beginning. He was also trying far too hard.
A crash at Miami could have ended worse than fourth place. At VIR, Maynard started from pole with the stated goal of dominating the race and instead found several different ways to wreck the Mustang. He finished 23rd.
“I was pushing so hard in those first races,” Maynard said. “When VIR loaded up, I was slightly aggro and wanted to dominate. I ended up wrecking three or four times.”
By Road America, neither driver had managed meaningful practice or setup work. Qualifying went badly enough that Griffin and Maynard started near the rear of the field. A late setup change meant the first race laps doubled as a development session, which is generally a poor method for reducing stress.
Griffin started 24th and won.
“I remember almost flying off the track multiple times in Turn 1 and a pretty epic pass on Nate Sides,” Griffin said. “That track is so dynamic on conditions. I knew if I could keep it clean that I would have a shot, and it worked out.”
Maynard climbed from 25th to fourth, salvaging a result but leaving Wisconsin with the uncomfortable sense that his title defense might already be slipping away.
Griffin was less interested in forecasting the season.
“Any series with throw-out rounds is very tough to predict,” he said. “The points swing at the end can be significant, so I just wanted to keep my head down and try to keep driving well.”
The Chase
The schedule turned toward Road Atlanta at precisely the right time for Maynard.
It is a circuit where he has traditionally been strong, and the weeks surrounding the race brought an unusual amount of seat time. HundredForce was preparing for the Nürburgring 24 Hours. Maynard was driving more consistently than he had in years.
The effect was not subtle.
Maynard won at Road Atlanta, then again at Laguna Seca. The frantic overdriving of the opening rounds began to disappear. The pace remained.
The next race was the Nürburgring Combined layout, and the team decided to make life unnecessarily difficult for itself.
Maynard and Griffin skipped qualifying and started from the pits. The idea was to give the field a head start and turn the race into a chase through the Nordschleife.
Jones, facing the same decision, chose differently. He qualified on pole.
“I knew there was no guarantee that Nicholas and Dan would make it through the Green Hell,” Jones said. “This was my opportunity to bring HundredForce to glory. I wasn’t going to take the chance. It was time to put it all out there. Put up or shut up.”
The choice proved correct.
Jones had enough pace to require a nearly perfect race from his teammates. Griffin’s run was hurt by a disconnect. Maynard climbed from the back to second. Jones survived his own scare after a pit stop, when cooler tires caught him out and sent the Mustang spinning.
“I knew at that moment my window of opportunity nearly closed,” Jones said. “Those two made me realize that one mistake nearly cost me the entire race, even though we started miles apart.”
The mistake did not cost him the race.
Jones won, delivering the only victory of the season not claimed by either title contender.
It was still a HundredForce victory.
Maynard carried the momentum forward. He won at Brands Hatch, Spa, Silverstone, and Imola—four victories in five races. The Nürburgring 24 preparation had quietly become useful in more ways than one. Driving every day had reminded Maynard of an obvious truth that sim racers, like most people, occasionally spend great effort rediscovering: practice helps.
“It seems like if I drive every day, I get faster and faster,” Maynard said. “Makes sense, right?”
Silverstone was the clearest example.
The race unfolded in changing conditions, with rain, a drying surface, and another wave of weather threatening to reshuffle the field. Maynard dropped as far as six seconds behind after Griffin and several others found a way past. Instead of forcing the issue, he managed the tires, waited for the circuit to come back toward him, and drove away when it mattered.
“For someone who said he doesn’t like that track, he sure blew the doors off everyone,” Griffin said. “He drove well and learned where the grip levels were in key corners more quickly than I could that night.”
Griffin responded with a victory at Monza.
The championship went to Le Mans unresolved.
The Same Number, Differently
Maynard entered the finale believing he needed to finish within roughly five positions of Griffin to defend the title.
The actual margin for error was smaller.
The low-downforce Le Mans setup produced a Mustang that Maynard found difficult to drive. Even while attempting to protect the championship, he spun more than once. The pace of the field made caution its own kind of risk. Drive too conservatively and the points disappeared anyway.
“I was even driving timid and attempting to be safe, but the pace of everyone else forced me to push a touch,” Maynard said. “I thought for sure I was throwing it away. Dan was driving the same setup. I still have no idea how he won that race.”
Griffin, in the same car with the same setup, had a different evening.
“Outside of a slowdown penalty, I don’t recall much drama,” he said. “I thought the car was actually okay. Between the low-downforce settings and the Mustang exaggerating some of our driving differences, it pulled us in different directions.”
Griffin won the finale.
Maynard finished fourth and initially believed it was enough. Only after the race, while working through the numbers, did the actual result become clear.
719 to 719.
Griffin had known the championship could become close, but chose not to spend the race buried in possible outcomes.
“I decided to just have fun in the race instead of concentrating on the possible variations,” he said. “Actually, I thought it was pretty awesome. He and I are so often very close in pace with each other, I thought it was fitting we tied.”
There was one small regret.
“Of course, I wish I would have not picked up that last off-track at Brands Hatch.”
Every Race
The tiebreaker gave Maynard his third OMEC championship in three seasons entered.
It also completed something larger than a successful title defense.
Maynard and Griffin won 11 of the season’s 12 races. Jones won the other. Every round ended with a HundredForce driver at the front.
Jones’s victory at the Nürburgring matters for more than the symmetry of the result. He joined HundredForce knowing he was quick. The season showed him where the next step might be.
“I’m not too young to have an ego, but I’m not too old to take a hit to the chin,” Jones said. “I knew I was quicker than most before joining HundredForce, and mature enough to accept that I’m not even close to the fastest. Nicholas and Dan gave me a reality check as to how far I have to go. I’m grateful for that, because they’re also teaching me how to reach the next level instead of just blowing my doors off on track and leaving me hanging.
“They’re true mentors, and that’s really hard to find these days in a world full of egos.”
Three seasons earlier, Maynard and Griffin met through OMEC. By the end of Season 14, they were sharing a car, sharing information, winning nearly everything available to win, and forcing a championship down to the final provision in the rulebook.
Griffin’s extra safety bonus made the points equal.
Maynard’s extra win made the difference.
After 12 races, that was all that remained between them.