Disastrous events for the AMR runners in GT Winter Series visit to Valencia

Racing again as separate series between GT4 and GT3/Challenge/Cup cars, it was the GT4 cars who were first effected by the weekends run of ‘bad luck’ within the first of the two sprint races after Max Hewitt was busy defending what would have been his first podium finish since 2019 when another hobbled car distracted him for a moment which allowed the Porsche behind to go up the inside of him – contact was made and the #39 Vantage spun out to recover to disappointing sixth place finish.

The irony here was that the hobbled car was limping back after being collected by the #700 Mucke Motorsport AMR Vantage GT4 of Thilo Goos.

That misfortune continued for both cars as Baudouin Detout suffered early sprint race two contact when it was his turn and was forced to pit at the end of the first lap with linkage damage before further contact for the Luxembourger did similar with the endurance round to complete a miserable weekend for them all. Goos would fare no better in race two and three after finding the gravel trap in race two and front-end damage in race three.

It was within the GT Winter Series that the most polar opposite kind of results were had by the two Comtoyou Racing entries as Matisse Lismont and Kobe Pauwels gained from their experiences togther of last season within the GT World Challenge Europe whilst the team’s new Brazilian duo of Ricardo Baptista and Rafael Suzuka experienced a European baptism of fire.

Race one and it was all Lismont within the GT3 class to secure an encouraging P1 in class whilst Baptista ran a wisely conservative race to come home P9 overall and P3 in class for his first GT3 race. Then, it all went wrong!

Race 2 for Pauwels and Suzuka and contact at the front for the two Astons saw the #700 car luckily recover its line into turn one but the #270 of Suzuka was spun around on track to fortunately face the right direction as the remainder of the pack blindly thundered passed. Having missed contact from all except the extreme tail of the pack, first one car ripped a wheel off the #270 before another impacted heavily into the rear of the car bringing out the Safety car. Fortunately, nobody within that five-car incident was hurt although the #270 wouldn’t be seen again on track.

Within all of that, a great run from Pauwels was finally blighted with a rear puncture after contact from behind and whilst being able to recover to the pit lane, was able to salvage a P23 finish overall, P3 in class. The final endurance race of the day for them at least went something like it was planned as their P4 qualifying position was rewarded with another P2 finish in class.

Photo credits – D Burgin / social media