Action (good and bad) galore for the AMR crews within GT World Challenge Europes visit to Monza

Whilst that happened at the start of the day for the Belgian based team, their sister #21 car of Jamie Day, Nicolas Baert of Kobe Pauwel gave something to celebrate after the young trio secure the silver class pole position at the end of the tree individual qualifying sessions ahead of Sunday’s three-hour race.

Unfortunately, that feat of effort also turned sour for both the crew and the team after an opening lap incident involving at least three cars saw the #21 Aston Martin and another Mercedes AMG spat out and heavily enough in the outside guard rail for them both the retire from the race after just the opening chicane!

That left just the #7 Pro entry of Nicki Thimm, Marco Sorensen and Mattia Drudi left from the Comtoyou Racing team to race alongside stablemates from both the Walkenhorst Motorsport team and Verstappen.com entry within the Pro, silver and gold classes.

The opening corner incident involving the #21 of Pauwels brought of the Safety Car for what was the first of eight times throughout the race but at least the two Walkenhorst entries had made up significant ground in those opening corners before the start of the Full Course Yellow. For the #35 Walkenhorst of Romain Leroux, however, their seven-place position change had been at also been at the expense of front-end damage that would necessitate two visits to the pit lane for repairs – once for a new nose and a second for an insecure bonnet. Both visits lost the Leroux, Oliver Soderstrom, Mattea Villagomez driven car a total of three laps despite the race being then, just twenty minutes old.

So that just left the #7 and #34 Pro entries plus the #33 Verstappen Gold class entries to secure what they could as the race as the race went green, back to another FCY for a beached car and back to green again in quick succession. By the end of the opening half hour, Thiim was comfortable in P5 whilst Pittard was down in P12 whilst Thierry Vermeulen was also hanging in their third in class.

The end of the first hour was interrupted by another FCY which this time closed the pit lane, forcing many to change strategy but the #7 car had pitted for service during an earlier yellow meaning that fuel was not a problem. The #33 meanwhile had pitted with Chris Lulham taking charge and he was quickly into the thick of the action with contact with another car which forced that car to retire with damage. Thankfully for them, Race Control chose not to assign any incident responsibility to the #33 driver.

Whilst Thiim just kept going, Christian Krognes was now aboard the #34 car having taken over from Pittard as they continued the chase from P8 overall before the #7 car finally pitted for a driver change not long before the halfway mark where Sorensen would retain his P2 position on exit thanks to other cars in front pitting with success penalties to serve.

Another Safety Car restart after a long FCY saw the #7 car lose out on track position but not in class as two/three cars were quicker off the mark when going back to green as Krognes continued in P8 and Lulham P3 in gold. 

By the end of the second hour, the #35 was still running but three laps down back in P51 overall so it was always going to be a long afternoon for them as FCY number six came into play before the three leading Aston Martins made their final stops with just under an hour to go as now it become the responsibility of Drudi, Henrique Chaves and Harry King respectively to bring their cars home.

Despite having to battle the hardest, Chaves would eventually lose out both on track and post-race to the unwanted attention of two chasing Porsches after eventually losing out to one on track, earlier contact with the same car saw the #34 car given a post-race time penalty that would drop them from their P7 finishing position on track to P12 on the timing screen.

Fortunately, no such problems for both the #7 Comtoyou and #33 Verstappen crews as the #7 Pro car scooped an important pre-Spa 24 podium position in P3 overall whilst the gold classed #33 came home for another P2 class finish.

All eyes now turn to the Spa 24 later this month.

Photo credits – Team / Series / social media