Endurance Cup: A treacherous start to the season 🎥
WETTERCHAOS Rain caused an unexpected outcome at the Blancpain Endurance Cup opener in Monza. Of the Swiss, only Adrian Amstutz had reason to cheer as class winner on a Lamborghini. As the highlights from Monza show at the beginning, the start of the first of the five races for the Blancpain GT Endurance Cup took place behind the [...]
As the highlights from Monza show at the beginning, the start of the first of the five Blancpain GT Endurance Cup races took place behind the safety car due to rain. Despite a slow puncture, Italian Mirko Bortolotti, who started from pole position, was able to hand over the Grasser Motorsport Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo to Rolf Ineichen after an hour in the lead.
Because the team believed in increasingly better conditions, they sent the Lucerne driver out onto the drying track on slicks. A wrong decision - it continued to drizzle, Ineichen slid around helplessly and was unable to hold off the opponents equipped with rain tires. When the ABS failed in the final third, the team, which had won at Daytona and Sebring in the spring, gave up.
Swiss team without racing luck
R-Motorsport also experienced a weekend to forget with its two new Aston Martin Vantage V8s. Several things went wrong, resulting in only 19th and 37th places for the two Swiss-flagged Aston Martin St. Gallen trios. Thanks to clever tire and pit stop strategies, the better-placed car was even in the lead at times in the middle third of the three-hour race.
Mature performance by Mauron and Frommenwiler
In the end, the best-placed Swiss representative was another from St. Gallen. Lucas Mauron and his teammates Arno Santamato and Gerhard Tweraser on the second Grasser Lambo showed a mature performance in the difficult conditions. Starting from 29th position, they worked their way up to eleventh. As fourth in the Silver Cup, they missed the podium by just 17 hundredths.
Lucas Mauron: "We overtook many competitors and were able to keep up with the pace of the front runners. In the end, we simply ran out of time to get even further ahead."
In pre-qualifying, Philipp Frommenwiler set the fastest lap of all 33 Silver drivers (eleven teams) in the Honda NSX GT3 Evo. The driver from Thurgau finished the race with his Matt McMurry and Struan Moore in 13th place overall and 16.2 seconds behind Mauron's team in fourth place in the Silver Cup.
Swiss double victory in the AM category
Adrian Amstutz celebrated another victory in the AM category. The Lucerne native and his Russian teammate Leo Machitski, with whom he won the 2018 championship, built up a lead of almost two laps in the ten-car class with the Lamborghini from Barwell, which the final runner Ramos safely managed.
They finished 16th overall after the three hours of racing on the same lap as the overall winners and well ahead of another Lamborghini, on which Christoph Lenz made his move. No AM team has finished so far ahead in the overall standings since 2015 (P14 at the 24 Hours of Spa by Parker Motorsport).
Kris Richard serious accident
For Kris Richard, the weekend in Monza ended before it had really begun. In the second free practice session, the Bernese lost control of his Lamborghini. In the violent impact into the tire stacks the chassis tore, also the transmission and the tank were broken. Thus the season start took place without him and the Daiko Lazarus team.
Kris Richard: "That was a mistake that can simply happen when you're driving absolutely at the limit. I've learned my lessons, and something like that won't happen to me again at Silverstone. The important thing is that the team is still fully behind me."
Porsche victory after seven years
Victory went to the Porsche 911 GT3 R of Dinamic Motorsports from Italy, driven by Andrea Rizzoli (I), Zaid Ashkanani (Kuwait) and Klaus Bachler (A). They came from 23rd on the grid to take the lead. For the Porsche brand, this meant the first race win in the Blancpain Endurance Cup since 2012.
Cédric Freiburghaus on the GT4 podium
The GT3 endurance race was preceded by two one-hour GT4 European Series races. Both fourth on Saturday on a dry track and third on Sunday in the rain, Cédric Freiburghaus and his Danish partner in a Phoenix Racing Audi R8 were the best Swiss drivers. The McLaren 570 of Equipe Verschuur (NL) won twice and now leads the European Championship with a maximum of 50 points ahead of Freiburghaus/Möller-Madsen (27).
Patric Niederhauser and Reini Kofler (A) brought the factory KTM X Bow home a good fourth in the second race, 16 seconds behind third. Florian Thoma finished 13th and 11th in his GT4 debut with his Indian partner in an Aston Martin Vantage.
The video shows the highlights of the 1st race run.
