For the #7 Comtoyou Racing crew of Nicki Thiim, Marco Sorensen and Mattia Drudi, this is of course their 2024 title defence race as they made full opportunity of the more favoured Ferrari being delayed with a broken-down car within the narrow pit lane entry during a pivotable part of last years race.

Thiim and Drudi come ‘fresh’ from their racing exploits with the Walkenhorst team at the ADAC Ravenol 24H Nurburgring race whilst Sorensen has already competed at the Le Mans 24hr two weeks ago before flying out stateside to race in the latest six-hour IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship from Watkins Glen before returning to Europe this weekend for the Spa 24! Some drivers and crew are really having to earn their salaries at the moment!!

Last time out in Italy also saw the #7 crew deliver their best result of the season so far with a P3 overall finish so a repeat of a win at Spa this time around could well throw that trio back to the front of the overall leaderboard as it did last season.

Another in-form crew is the #33 Verstappen.com gold class entry for Thierry Vermeulen, Chris Lulham and Harry King after they have finished both opening races second in class so another good performance in Belgium could see them (and others) pick up valuable mid race and end of race championship points.

In addition to these two front running contenders will be a further six Aston Martin Racing Vantage GT3 crews competing – most of course will be the remnants of the full season GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup entry but also two ad-hoc entries from both of the Beechdean AMR and another from the Comtoyou team.

Completing the full season entries who will be racing at Spa by right will be the #21 Comtoyou Racing silver entry of Nicolas Baert/Jamie Day/Kobe Pauwels with Xavier Massen alongside the #270 Comtoyou Racing bronze classed entry of Jessica Hawkins/Antoine Potty/Alexandre Leroy with Rodrigo Almeida plus the two Walkenhorst Motorsport entries. These are the #34 Pro entry of Christian Krognes/David Pittard and Henrique Chaves and the #35 silver entry of Mateo Villagomez/Oliver Soderstrom and Romain Leroux. The #270 crew will certainly be hoping for better after Potty crashed out heavily at Monza during an earlier session and were not able to continue.

The additional two Pro-Am entries are the #11 Comtoyou entry of Frederic Jousset/Bernardo Sousa/Sebastian Alvarez and Sergio Sette Camara plus the #100 Beechdean entry for Andrew Howard/Ross Gunn/Valentin Hasse-Clot and Anthony McIntosh.

Tuesday sees the pre-event bronze driver test before Free Practice/Pre-Qualifying/Qualifying and night practice on Thursday before Super Pole and warm up on Friday afternoon/evening before the start of the race at 16:30 hrs local on Saturday.

Photo credits – Teams / Series / social media

Returning to the German based series with two such cars for both Gilles Magnus and Nicolas Baert, we assume that they have either repaired what they needed to in-between series this week or that they have enough cars to go around.

Zandvoort will be another challenging round for the young duo within both the #7 and #8 entries as even twenty GT3 cars around the Dutch coastal circuit will no doubt bring along more accident and incident along the way.

From a performance point of view, the previous round from the Lausitzring two weeks ago saw promise developing after the first-round calamity so we will wait to see just what the two Aston drivers can do this weekend.

Photo credits - DTM

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

Both teams were busy last weekend with multiple cars within both the DTM Series and N24 Qualifiers respectively and that continues this time around with five AMR Vantage GT3 entries as well as a single car entry from the Verstappen.com (2Seas Motorsport) for this second endurance round of the season.

These time additions did drop the dup down to fourth in GT3 Pro-Am after race one but only to P3 in class at the end of Sundays hour long race for their second podium finish of the season so far.

That is not however, how the story ends for Alatalo and Di Giusto as both will be back with the team as well as former MotoGP World Champion Jorge Lorenzo at the end of the month for the final round of the Endurance side of the Italian GT Championship – again from Monza.

Whilst the Sprint side has been the more successful side so far, any podium success at the end makes it all worth the investment.

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Struggling at the start of the season, success finally came the way of the Finnish/Italian combination during the opening half of the Mugello weekend last time out in late August when the crew earned their first podium finish with a P3 in class in race one before an unfortunate technical glitch during their mandatory stop in race two thwarted any possibilities of any repeat.

This weekend, the #5 car has again proved fast within the rains of early testing but with the race weekend forecasted to be warm and dry – that set up now counts for nothing.

At the end of the month, the team will return to Monza for the final round of the Italian GT Endurance Championship with former MotoGP Champion Jorge Lorenzo again joining both Alatalo and Di Giusto within the car.

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For what was another healthy Aston Martin Racing powered contingent again this season, the German based Prosport Racing team have this time called time on their endeavours within the series as both their previous #99 and #100 entries of Raphael Rennhofer/Hugo Sasse and Fabio Rauer and Hendrik Still have both been omitted from the provisional entry list for this event.

Indeed, it was only a couple of weeks ago that we saw Rennhofer, Sasse and Still all compete within two of the teams AMR Vantage GT3 cars at the last round of the ADAC GT Masters Series from Spa Francorchamps.

Other than that, the remaining six AMR Vantage GT4 crews remain unchanged from previous rounds as Florent Grizaud and Kevin Jimenez need to recoup a sixty eight points deficit within their Am Class with their #72 GPA Racing AMR, Stanislav Safronov and Aleksandr Vaintrub maintain a marginal one point lead within their Pro-Am class with their newer #7 Mirage Racing AMR whilst the silver classed #5 Mirage Racing and #39, #74 and #82 Racing Spirit of Leman AMR entries are now all too far back in the table to trouble the championship leaders even if they had a 100% finishing rate in Italy.

Ironically, it was the #99 Prosport car of Sasse and Rennhofer who headed the Aston Martin powered contenders in nineth overall within the silver class.

Qualifying for both races precedes race one on Saturday (race one being waved off at 17:00hrs local before race two starting at 12:35hrs local on Sunday.

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