News from Spa 24Hr test days

Wednesday, July 04, 2018

With the final names falling into place over the course of this week for the Spa 24Hr Official Test, it has been great to welcome some very familiar names back into the fray but also sad to see a 'not so old' fan favourite move aside.

Yesterday, Swiss based R-Motorpsort confirmed that Alex Brundle would be taking a back seat with the team at the 24hr race in just over three weeks time and moving forward with the remainder of the Blancpain GT Series season as experienced GT racer Dominik Baumann moves in and joins Maxime Martin and Marvin Kirchhofer aboard the teams #62 AMR Vantage GT3 in his place.

The reason for the change is presumably performance based but the team did confirmed that Brundle would be staying with the team to help launch their 2019 racing programme with the all new V8 Vantage GT3 as raced by Ross Gunn so successfully at the Aston Martin Racing Festival at Le Mans a few weeks ago once the new car goes into production later this year.

For Baumann, this weeks test was his first experience of the venerable V12 powered car.

Things didn't go quite so well for the teams #76 car which was forced to sit out the whole day yesterday with the car requiring an engine change. We're not sure if that was due to a fault or just component life related but at least both cars were able to run today and collect vital set up data ahead of the big event despite the torrential rain.

The other full season entry from Oman Racing by TF Sport elected to run for just a single day, picking the best weather that the two days had on offer yesterday as new recruit Ross Gunn joined the #97 crew of Ahmad Al Harthy, Euan McKay and Charlie Eastwood for the first time. Knowledgeable in both GT4 and GTE 24Hour races we believe that this will be his first 24hr at Spa and in a GT3? (awaiting to be corrected on that one!)

Joining them as a one off entry was local team Brussels Racing with their distinctly 'local' entry of Tim Verbergt, Koen Wauters, Sam Dejonghe and Nicolas Vandierendonck in aboard their #100 Pro-Am entered car. Being the teams only second race this year aboard their AMR Vantage GT3, this driver line up will be entering into perhaps the most competitive class of the series (like they all are really) at the end of the month.

Having topped the timing screen yesterday, the British GT entry from Optimum Motorsport remained at the circuit today as Pro driver Jonny Adam continued to coach Flick Haigh around the infamous Spa circuit in their V12 Vantage GT3 ahead of that Championship's race at Spa in just two weeks time. The two other AMR cars from TF Sport concluded their testing yesterday.