Second-gen 991 earned
Porsche its first Blancpain
Endurance win since 2012Returning rain ended
Auto Sport Promotion
Merc’s early hopesSRO/
DI
RKBOGAERTSPHOTOGRAPHYSRO/DI
RKBOGAERTSPHOTOGRAPHY42 AUTOSPORT.COM 18 APRIL 2019RACE CENTRE WORLD OF SPORTunder full-course-yellow conditions.
Haase initially edged way from Bachler,
who’d quickly passed the Rowe car
that Romain Dumas had taken over from
Mathieu Jaminet. The Porsche driver
then started nibbling into what had stood
as a five-second lead when the Audi’s
left-rear tyre gave out.
That allowed Bachler to ease to a
14-second win over the FFF Racing
Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo driven by
Andrea Caldarelli, Dennis Lind and Marco
Mapelli. An early off for Lind and then a
delay during a short-lived FCY at the top
of the first hour blunted the challenge of
Lambo’s new factory-backed operation.
Reigning champions Maro Engel, Yelmer
Buurman and Luca Stolz somehow brought
their Black Falcon Mercedes-AMG GT3
through to third despite an incident forStolz in the opening stint that dropped
the car as low as 25th and damaged the
front-end aerodynamics.
The Auto Sport Promotion Merc team
looked to be on course for victory after
putting Raffaele Marciello onto slicks when
he took over from Vincent Abril. The Italian
led by as much as 10 seconds before a safety
car robbed him of both that advantage and
tyre temperature. Just to compound his
ill fortune, the rain intensified and then
Michael Meadows clonked a corner marker
and broke a damper before the end.
The Grasser Lambo squad that led early
on with Mirko Bortolotti also lost out
with the same gamble, not least because
the ABS on the Huracan co-driven by
Rolf Ineichen and Christian Engelhart
was in the process of packing up.
GARY WATKINSPorsche ends seven-year Blancpain quest
BLANCPAIN GT ENDURANCE CUP
MONZA (ITA)
14 APRIL
ROUND 1/5A marque that hadn’t won in the Blancpain
GT Series Endurance Cup since 2012
combined with a team making its
championship debut to take an unlikely
victory at Monza last weekend. The Porsche
911 GT3-R run by the Italian Dinamic squad
wasn’t one of the pre-event favourites, but
Klaus Bachler, Zaid Ashkanani and Andrea
Rizzoli prevailed at the end of a rain-
affected race hit by three safety cars.
It would be wrong to say that the team,
a stalwart of one-make Porsche racing,
was lucky, though it benefited from others’
misfortune. But in the crucial middle hour
of the race, Ashkanani had the pace to
propel the car from just outside the top 10
after the first round of pitstops to third
place going into the second.
It wasn’t clear if wet tyres or slicks were
the right call as the rain eased, but it was
obvious that Porsche’s second attempt at
developing a GT3 contender out of the
991-shape 911 was the car to have, courtesy
of its rear-mounted engine. The Dinamic
machine on grooved Pirellis and the two
Rowe 911s – Matt Campbell on slicks and
Sven Muller on wets – made rapid progress.
The Sainteloc Audi shared by
Christopher Haase, Simon Gachet and
Steven Palette emerged in the lead after
the final stops, however. The French-run
R8 LMS looked more like a top-six finisher
than an outright winner before it gained
massively by pitting for the final time