AMR looking to emulate last years fortunes in Mexico

Thursday, August 31, 2017

This time last year Aston Martin Racing enjoyed probably one of their best racing successes of the 2016 World Endurance Championship season with a double podium in the GTE Pro class, a race that established itself as the catalyst to the #95 securing the GTE Pro titles at the final race of the year thanks mainly to the progress made by Dunlop.

This weekend sees the three full season WEC entries from AMR return to the Autodromo Hermanos Rodrguez near Mexico City for the fifth round of the WEC season in a situation similar to where the team found themselves last year completely, dependant upon the series technical officials allowing them to run with a competitive Balance of performance.

Despite the adoption of an automatic, computer interpreted BoP system for the 2017 WEC season, this race will see two GTE Pro cars run with their fifth different BoP setting of the season (Le Mans 24Hr has been included in that although they run with a separate BoP system to that of the WEC). In a break to previous rounds where the Ferrari 488 GTE has been used as a benchmark for the remaining three marques, the BoP adjustment made for Mexico alters each marque slightly differently and includes (for the first time) a reduction in power performance for the Ferrari so Mexico should see some tighter racing than previously seen.

The BIG topic of the race weekend at the moment however is the terrible weather conditions being experienced in Mexico as a whole with torrential storms forcing the closure of Mexico City airport and countless domestic and international flights in and out of the country being diverted or cancelled stranding many who should be, by now at the circuit.

This report from Dailysportscar.com describes the situation.

Other from that, there is no change to the driver line ups in any of the cars with Daniel Serra again bucking the trend and making up as third driver in the #97 car alongside Darren Turner and Jonny Adam.

Weather dependant, track action is scheduled to start tomorrow with the first of the Free Practice sessions before Qualifying on Saturday afternoon before the start of the race at midday on Sunday. For those in the UK, the time difference to Mexico is 6 hours behind BST.