Testing times ahead

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

 


And long may that be the case as several Aston Martin Racing powered teams have continued to pound the tracks of Europe this week ahead of the start of their 2023 season, which for some is just a couple of months away.

Over in Portimao this week, you will find the Bullitt Racing AMR team continue with testing with their AMR Vantage GT3 ahead of a recently confirmed entry into the Asian Le Mans Series which starts in Dubai in February.


With no driver names stated within that confirmation, it may not be safe to suggest that team boss Stephen Pattrick will compete within that series but he has apparently retained the driver mentoring services and racing skills of factory driver Valentin Hasse-Clot after this pairing (along with the help from Theo Nouet along the way of course) came so close to challenging for the overall GT3 crown by the end of their Michelin Le Mans Cup Series endeavours this year. Their third ALMS driver has yet to be identified and there appears to be other drivers taking the opportunity to test with the team as well!

Then just across the border into Spain, has seen the GPA Racing team put one of their Aston Martin Racing Vantage GT4’s through its paces with perspective clients ahead of any potential return for them into their domestic FFSA GT4 or European GT4 Series next season.


Then sharing the Catalunya circuit with them and others this week will be the Aston Martin Racing team themselves, pounding the circuit with their factory drivers Marco Sorenson, Charlie Eastwood and Ross Gunn in what we believe to be developmental testing for their now aging Vantage GT3 platform ahead of that possibility of an ‘evo’ version.

This isn’t the first test of this nature that the squad have undertaken with the Beechdean AMR liveried car as a test bed as both Gunn and Maxime Martin undertook something similar at Motorland Aragon earlier last month before the Belgian parted company with the squad before his return to BMW.


Again, all at AMR have remained tight lipped about this evolutionary version of the trusted Vantage with testing being conducted on what we believe to be solely internal – non-visible components before moving onto anything else this is visible externally later on.

This will also be good seat time for many as both Gunn and Eastwood (at least) are due to compete at the start of the IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship and its Daytona 24 opener in January albeit in different team equipment to this week.


Looks like 2023 has already begun.

Photo credits – Teams / Social media
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