Sadly not all plain sailing at Le Castellet this week for the Aston Martin Racing runners
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Having completed yesterday their two-day test, the forty-two cars of the European Le Mans Series now prepare themselves and their cars ahead of the more formal proceedings of later this week when Free Practice for their opening round begins this Friday ahead of Sunday’s four-hour race.
Two Aston Martin Racing V8 Vantage GTE’s of course completed the Prologue test yesterday with the #69 Oman Racing with TF Sport car of Ahmad Al Harty, Sam De Haan and Marco Sorenson being the faster of the two TF Sport entered cars over their four available sessions to them with a gap over the GTE class of less than 1.4 seconds again showing the class of the field this season.
Running this year a GTE field of twelve cars, both the #69 and #95 Oman Racing car of John Hartshorne, Jonny Adam and Henrique Chaves ran their own respective programmes that saw both cars complete over four hundred laps around the 5.7km Le Castellet circuit between them.
Following on from the ELMS grid, today was the turn of the Le Mans Cup runners who also enjoy another large (record breaking in fact) number of entries for the LMP3 and GT3 series.
Represented within the forty-three-car field and just one of eight GT3 cars is the Spanish based Bullit Racing team who have moved across to the AMR Vantage GT3 for the first time this season with their #99 car being driven by team boss Stephen Pattrick and Theo Nouet in lieu of Valentin Hasse-Clot who is double booked this weekend with his FFSA GT4 commitments.
Unfortunately for this team, an incident on track towards the end of this morning’s track session saw their car spin at turn nine only for it to be collected by the #3 DKR Engineering Duqueine LMP3 traveling behind at speed from behind. We understand that significant front-end damage was caused to the car as a result.
Whether or not this damage is repairable before this weekend’s opening race remains to be seen, but like any team in any series facing this kind of problem, there is never sufficient time to allow them to catch up and be back where they wanted to be!
Photo credits – Teams / social media / ELMS
