New Aston Martin Racing powered faces appear in WRLs visit to Sebring
Friday, November 10, 2023
With Friday testing already underway and our eyes and ears of CSJ Motorsport still pounding the beat within the paddock, we see that we have four Aston Martin Racing powered teams due to compete within the GTO class – three we already know but one is racing their AMR for the very first time.
David Tuaty’s TLM Racing team is back with two of their customer driven Aston Martins as Jim Hamman, JP Southern and Tom Herb power the red #172 car whilst Pippa Mann, Zang O’Shaunessy and Troy Ermish driver the newly sponsored #888 together for the first time.
Whilst we believe the older, normally aspirated #909 Automatic Racing AMR Vantage GT4 is there with presumably familiar Stoner Car Care driven faces, the main attention does swing over to the #89 entry from the Team 89X Motorsport team who have taken delivery of two familiar cars.
Whilst one is the familiar AMR yellow and the other plain black, we understand that both have been purchased from New Zealand where both were driven within the New Zealand GT Series up until the end of last season with the yellow one being the Vantage GT8R car of Stephen Harrison. The other is a Vantage GT4 variant that is believed to be that of Shane Helms where both drivers drove with the RaceLab team within the NZ GT Series back in 2022/23 seasons.
We don’t presently know of all their names – other than Mike Fitzpatrick runs alongside both Sebastian and Jeff within whichever one they elect to run.
As usual for the WRL Series, it’s a long a hard eight-hour race on Saturday before they do it all again on Sunday before shipping out to the Circuit of the Americas for the final round of the season in early December.
Photo credits - Tom Beers Photo / CSJ / Racelab
