RACE CENTRE SPA 24 HOURS
SMP Ferrari scored maximum
points at six and 12 hours but
a crash ruined its chancesEastwood celebrates pro-am victory
for TF Sport after overnight rebuildSROBRECHTDECANCQ^ PHOTOGRAPHYand Mario Farnbacher never truly looked
like winning the race, but it was always
there or there abouts and very nearly took
fifth. Van der Zande lost out on the final lap
to Mathieu Jaminet in the second of the
Rowe Porsches, which was always fighting
back from a wrong call on tyres in the
opening hour in the car he shared with
Romain Dumas and Sven Muller.
Two British teams took class honours
at Spa. TF Sport bounced back from a big
shunt in free practice on Thursday to win
the Pro-Am category with Nicki Thiim,
Charlie Eastwood, Salih Yoluc and Ahmad Al
Harthy. Its Aston Martin Vantage GT3 was
rendered hors de combat in Yoluc’s accident,
resulting in a switch to a car used in British
GT and a series of all-nighters to build it up
with parts lifed for a 24-hour race.
Last year, Barwell Motorsport missed
out on victory in class for crews made
up entirely of silver-rated drivers by
seconds, but this time claimed a narrow
victory with Sandy Mitchell, James
Pull and Jordan Witt.until a bizarre mix-up on tyres in the
small hours of Sunday morning. Pirelli had
mounted the left-side tyres back to front,
the rear on the front rim and vice versa.
When Lynn complained that something
was wrong, he was brought in and the fronts
replaced, which obviously didn’t cure the
problem. A second unscheduled pitcall was
turned into the technical stop. Any chance
of a fightback disappeared with the failure
of the car’s windscreen wiper.
Honda was the surprise package at Spa
last weekend. The NSX GT3 Evo shared by
Renger van der Zande, Bertrand Baguettethe AF Corse-run SMP Racing entry
shared by Davide Rigon, Miguel Molina
and Mikhail Aleshin. The BGTS Endurance
Cup championship leaders coming into
Spa claimed maximum points at the six
and 12-hour marks and were running third
shortly after the red-flag period ended when
Aleshin went beyond the kerbs and onto the
matting at Fagnes, turning sharp left into
the KCMG Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3
with Oliver Jarvis at the wheel.
Aleshin insisted that the Briton had
already tagged him in the corner, and
a scuff on the left-rear corner offered
some credence to his claim. Whatever, the
resulting suspension damage meant a long
stay in the pits before the car returned only
briefly to the track in order to complete the
couple of laps required for it to be classified.
Lamborghini’s challenge wilted with the
red flag at 0540, even though it was leading
at that point. The Grasser team’s lead
Huracan Evo driven by Mirko Bortolotti,
Rolf Ineichen and Christian Engelhart
still had to make its technical pitstop.
The team had been due to make it when
the yellow that preceded the race stoppage
began. That meant the car needed to stop
straight after the restart, because it was
coming up to the 65-minute maximum that
cars are allowed to stay on track without
pitting. The five minutes it spent in the pits
shortly afterwards dropped it into the lower
reaches of the top 20 where it more or less
stayed on the way to a 16th-place finish.
That was three places ahead of the only
one of the three R-Motorsport Aston
Martin Vantage GT3s to make the finish.
The car shared by Alex Lynn, Jake Dennis
and Marvin Kirchhofer had been in the mix“Honda was Spa’s
surprise package.
It never looked like
winning, but very
nearly took fifth”