Success for the AMR Vantage as the NLS season reconvened with a double header this weekend (UPDATED)

Sunday, April 07, 2024

This weekend also saw a successful return of the Aston Martin Racing Vantage GT3 and GT4 platforms to the Nurburgring Langstrecken Serie who this time ran a Saturday/Sunday back-to-back double header event at the infamous Nurburgring Nordschleife.

Entering seven cars between them, it was again up to the locally based Prosport Racing and Doer Motorsport team to facilitate the return of both returning and new customer driver base for these two four-hour races, although not all would return on Sunday (by design).

Within the top-flight SP9 class, the Doer team would again be entering their #69 AMR Vantage GT3 that brothers Phil and Ben Dorr would share with AMR works driver Darren Turner, but that car would get no further than qualifying on Saturday (finishing P7 in class) before disappearing from the event. We envisage that to mean that the car suffered from some kind of event which meant that it could not continue in the weekend.

UPDATE - Darren Turner's media report has confirmed that Phil Dorr started the #69 car in race 1 but dropped a wheel off that section of resurfaced track on the opening lap to suffer a 120mph + accident which resulted in no injury for the driver but significant damage to the car. Insufficient parts and time forced the withdrawal from NLS2 the next day.

Then, there was the #17 SP9 Pro-Am entry from the Prosport Racing team for drivers Maxime Dumarey, Simon Balcaen and Marek Bockmann. Only running Saturday (by design) last year’s Pro-Am champions came home a class second in the season opener.

Prosport were also fielding three more Vantage GT4’s on Saturday and two entries in Sunday’s race too. Their best result was a P4 SP10 finish for the #177 car of Mathieu Castelein and Steven Palette whilst their all-female crew of Jasmin Preisig and Celia Martin did have to swap their plans about from only running to NLS1 to that of NLS2 where they finished P6 in class.

The best results however came from the #169 Doer crew of Oskar Sandberg, Aaron Wensich and Nick Wustenhagen who claimed an SP10 class win on Saturday and backed that up with a class P2 on Sunday.

The #179 Doer Vantage GT4 of Niklas Abrahamsen and Phillipe Charlaix did what was needed of them to secure their NLS Permit.

Photo credits – Teams / social media