D'Station hoping for better luck with Turner in Super GT endurance race at Fuji
Thursday, August 01, 2019
It's onwards to (hopefully) the land of the rising sun for Aston Martin Racing factory driver Darren Turner this weekend as he returns to the D'Station Racing AMR team for the latest round of Japanese Super GT Series at Fuji Speedway.
Having already supported the team earlier this year in opening rounds of the Pirelli Super Taikyu Series with podium winning success, Fuji will be the first time that Turner has raced with team regulars Tomonobu Fujii and JP de Oliveira in the Super GT Series side of the teams operations although he has previously tested with them.
Since swapping to the new 2019 specification AMR Vantage GT3, D'Station Racing AMR have endured a very testing re-introduction into the second tier of the Japanese national GT series with both accident damage and technical issues blighting their race performances so far.
Indeed, the series last race in Buriram, Thailand ticked all the right boxes in performance terms until after the compulsory pit stop when a rear puncture at the start of the lap robbed the team of what would have been a very much deserved podium finish with only minutes remaining.
The fifth round of the Series at Fuji is the 500mile endurance round (hence the third driver) and is something that Turner has posted that he is very much looking forward too having missed the World Endurance Championship race at the circuit last season when drivers Marco Sorensen and Nicki Thiim posted the new Vantage GTE's first WEC class pole position.
With the GT300 cars racing with the faster GT500 cars from a staggered rolling start, Fuji will see 15 GT500 cars and 29 GT300 cars take the start on Sunday.
As a full AMR Partner team, D'Station get the full help from the AMR factory in UK and have all been working tirelessly to help resolve some of the previous performance issues. With the team also having recently acquired another brand new Vantage GT3 (which won them another podium last time out in the Super Taikyu Series) we wonder if they will be running that new car in preference to their other Super GT chassis that has been involved in a couple of sizeable accidents already?
Photo credits - D'Station Racing