Natures own Balance of Performance

With the continued absence of any further adjustments to either the GTE Pro or GTE Am's Balance of Performance requirements going into this weekends penultimate round of the World Endurance Championship at Spa, it appears that Mother Nature will herself be selecting her own set of figures as the chances of any repetition of last years warmth and glorious sunshine becomes nothing but a distant memory.

The biggest problem with all the forecasts out at the moment for the Spa Francorchamps area of Belgium is just who (if any) do you believe as some of the predictions have been wildly varied to say the least.

On todays preliminary events at the circuit, the weather has appeared to be clear and still reasonably warm as the drivers and crew made their customary track walk before official track action begins tomorrow lunchtime with the first of two Free Practice sessions. After weeks of constantly higher than average temperatures across Europe, that is expected to drop between now and race morning as a cold front moves down from Scandinavia bringing with it possible freezing overnight temperatures and various weather fronts and the inevitable 'wet stuff'. That could all be enough to take the excitement on track to a whole new dimension going into Le Mans as both GTE are still as yet undecided!


The possibilities of snow on race day on Saturday instantly brings back those strange and eerie sights of Silverstone back in April 2106 when a whole Free Practice session was lost to the weather (snow) so lets hope nothing like that happens at Spa because when it rains or snows there - it does it in huge volumes!!


Catching up with Tom Ferrier at Snetterton yesterday, he confirmed that Jonny Adam was originally assigned to the #97 AMR factory GTE Pro car for Spa - hence the reason why Euan Hankey was recalled to the team for the first time since Le Mans 2018 but even with AMR then deciding to stick with their usual two driver line ups it was necessary to keep with Hankey over Jonny Adam to allow him track time again within the TF Sport V8 Vantage GTE before Le Mans when Adam will be most uncertainly unavailable to them. Hankey did test with an available car alongside the factory #95 crew at the circuit a few weeks ago.

We will be making our own way down to the circuit early tomorrow morning to hopefully be their in time for the first Free Practice session. We will hopefully see some of you down there too!

Lets hope for a result reminiscent of last year - in GTE Am at least!!

Photo credits - WEC / TF Sport