Weekend round up from around the world
Sunday, March 19, 2023
With both Satoshi Hoshino and Tomonobu Fujii also due to race at available rounds of their Japanese series as and when their WEC allow, it was the #47 crew of Tatsuya Hoshino, Jake Parsons, Max Orido and Kenji Hama who took the ST-1 Class spoils after a late issue for the #2 KTM towards the end of the five-hour opener.
At the opening round of this year’s Nurburgring Langstrecken Serie around the infamous Green Hell, we had crews from both the Prosport Racing and Dorr Motorsport teams racing there on Saturday win both Vantage GT3 and GT4 format.
With Christoph Breuer deputising within the #17 Vantage GT3 for an unavailable Jean Glorieux, he and Maxime Dumarey secured a SP9 Am Class win for their efforts (albeit the sole runner within that class) but to come first – first you must finish!!
With that change in crew left the #37 SP9 Pro class entered Vantage GT3 of Mike David Ortmann short of a driver so ‘resident’ driver coach Nico Verdonck filled that gap for them to claim a highly credible P14 finish in class at the head of the pack.
In the GT4 classes, the #176 Prosport SP10 runner of Gabriela Jilkova, Yevgen Sokolovskiy and Guido Dumarey came home in sixth whilst the SP8T classed #150 Dorr Motorsport entered Vantage GT4 of Ben Dorr and Theo Nouet claimed the top honour in their first NLS event.
Over in New Zealand, the solo AMR Vantage GT8R of Stephen Harrison worked his magic to claim an opening race at Taupo with a win and a fourth (along with a P12 in the hour-long endurance race) to elevate his position up to third in the GT4 table as the series moves onto its finale at Manfield in a month’s time.
Finally in Malaysia, the Sepang 12hr got back under this year after a number of years of enforced sabbatical with the locally based Viper Niza Racing entering their Aston Martin Racing Vantage GT3.
Fresh out of the container (in a sorry state) from its race ending accident in the final round of the Asian Le Mans Series at Yas Marina a few weeks ago, the Douglas Khoo lead team spent several days simply rebuilding the front end of their #65 car to even allow him, Dominic Ang and Jazeman Jaafar to compete this weekend.
Sadly for them, some early spins in the opening stint for Khoo put them back towards the end of the thirteen strong grid to eventually come home in tenth in what was actually an eight hour race!
Photo credits – Teams / Series / E Metzner / Social Media
Photo credits – Teams / Series / E Metzner / Social Media
