Bruising opener for CMRT Eurasia in Sepang

Monday, April 16, 2018

Having made a late driver announcement just ahead of the first round of the 2018 Blancpain GT Asia season, reigning GT3 Am Champions CMRT Eurasia could consider themselves unlucky with just a single podium from the weekend's racing.

With last years championship winning drivers, James Cai and Kenneth Lim otherwise detained on other business it was left to stand in drivers Adrian D'Silva and Sangwhi Rick Yoon to carry the mantle in Asia for the Aston Martin Racing marque.

Short on winter testing, the #68 AMR V12 Vantage GT3 used the available Thursday Paid Test day to get used to both the car and circuit and for much of the time resided mid table in the 29 car field, slowly improving lap times as they went.

Leaving some of their best laps to the two Qualifying sessions for each of the two races over the weekend, Am driver and last year Audi racer Yoon claimed class pole for Race 1 and D'Silva P3 for Sunday's Pro starting race.

Unfortunately, before the first lap of race 1 had even been completed their race was effectively over for the Eurasia crew as heavy damage sustained from a spinning Audi forced immediate repairs under a Safety Car before the car temporarily returned to track before stopping again soon after.

After late night repairs, Race 2 did prove to be rewarding for both the drivers and the team for their efforts as they managed to avoid any early race drama to claim a worthy P2 in class.

“Yesterday I hated motorsport,” stated team principal Mark Goddard. “Today I loved it again and it’s a great end to the weekend. To get the class pole with Rick was fantastic, a very special achievement and get P2 in class today was as good as we could have expected.

“So, there are many positives. We know the Aston Martin is very strong following Saturday’s incident, the team worked very hard to repair it and got very little sleep and yet everything came together with a strong result.”