No reward for the five Aston Martins as ADAC GT4 Germany visits the coastal circuit of Zandvoort

Monday, June 26, 2023

The two races of the second round of the GT4 Germany Series from Zandvoort at the weekend sadly produced a full set on non-podium winning positions for the five Aston Martin Racing powered crews at the weekend as the series again supported the DTM Series at the Dutch coastal circuit.

With Vantage GT4 crews from both the Prosport Racing and Doer Motorsport teams, actually making the second round with already a feat of achievement after all four of their cars were damaged in a road traffic accident coming away from the opening round from Oschersleben a few weeks ago.

At Oschersleben, the team also suffered from technical woe across all four cars before their reigning series champions, Mike David-Ortmann and Hugo Sasse finally came away with a race win in the second race.

In-between rounds, the team’s #19 crew has also been swapped out as brother and sister line up Andreas and Jessica Bachman have been replaced with former series champion in Ricardo Van Der Ende with Benjamin Lessennes. Other than that, all was constant as Fabienne Wohlwend again partnered Celia Martin in the #13 car with Yevgen Sokolovskiy again racing with Damon Surzyshyn within their Trophy classed #48 car with Theo Nouet and Ben Dorr again in the #007 Doer AMR Vantage.

Fridays Qualifying saw a solid start from both the #1 and #19 cars as Ortmann secured a second row start with Lessennes in P9 after his first run within the Aston Martin. However, with Qualifying being one thing and racing another, the BoP afforded to the AMR Vantage GT4 this year across the board is simply ‘not what it used to be’ leaving the young Germans a hard hour-long battle to secure a P4 finish with the #19 crew rounding off their debut race together in P10.

Sunday’s second race fell on much of the same level with the Aston runners never having the ‘legs’ underneath them to contest for position at the front of the twenty-seven strong grid, although Van Der Ende did string a lap together around his local circuit to claim a P3 start.

Eventually finish P5 (for the #1 car) and P6 (for the #19 car), these were again the pick of the crop as the #007 Doer car struggled all weekend within the midfield – likewise within the all- female #13 car who’s best result was P18 in race 1.

These results see the #1 car slip to P4 within the overall driver’s championship table but with the debuting #19 car crew moving up to P13 after two good opening races.