Success in China for AMR's most colourful team

Monday, May 14, 2018

Last weekend saw the China GT Championship kick off its 2018 campaign from the Zhuhai International Circuit with a colourful collection of four Aston Martin V8 Vantage GT4's.

Stepping up from two, part time cars of last season, China Equity AMR acquired to two of the latest GT4's off the Prodrive production line just in time for last months Official test and are this year the sole AMR runners with Team Zea Fea not returning for 2018. Due to the wash out that was the Official Test in Beijing last month, most of the GT3/GTC/GT4 teams of the China GT Championship had two days of further testing made available to them before the opening two races.

Running three cars in the Pro-Am class and the other in the Am-Am class we had hoped that both Ross Gunn and Jack Mitchell would each be taking a full season part in the championship with the team but last minute deals meant that only Mitchell would travel out to coastal China this time together with the three supporting Prodrive engineers.

Mitchell would share the #618 car with financier Ryan Liu whilst the remainder of the driver line up would be regionally based including Yuan Tinting - one of two lady racers in the championship this year.

As still a fledgling championship in terms of world wide interaction and news flow, we know that testing came painfully to both Liu and Tingting after both their cars suffered extensive damage during testing and free practice to such a degree as the #618 would missed Qualifying for Saturdays race.

Despite that, two great drives from that pair saw them charge from plum last to second by the end of the race and then went one better to dominate race 2 for the top step. Further podiums were earned by the team over the weekend with their #118 car of Zhang Dasheng and Shen Cheng securing P3 in race as well as Tingting claiming P3 in the Am class despite her running as a single driver for the event.