Louis Delétraz: The European Championship title is ready 🎥
SWISS WEEKEND BALANCE Geneva's Louis Delétraz celebrated his third ELMS victory of the season with his LMP2 team at Spa. Lucas Mauron celebrated twice in the DTM Trophy as part of the DTM in Assen. Belgian team WRT not only celebrated a fine home win at the fifth round of the European Le Mans Series in Spa-Francorchamps. The team and [...]
Belgian team WRT not only celebrated a fine home victory at the fifth round of the European Le Mans Series in Spa-Francorchamps. The team and its three drivers Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Louis Delétraz are now champions ahead of time.
They are only added up at the end
However, the man from Geneva must actually be at the wheel of WRT's Oreca-Gibson V8 at the final race in Portugal on October 24 - otherwise his Polish and Chinese teammates will be the sole champions. Exception: If no one else scores points, the trio will remain together at the top of the standings.
Fabio Scherer, for example, experienced just how unexpected this can be in the World Championship when he had to stay in a hotel in the spring due to a positive corona test and thus missed a race in the WEC. However, WRT will certainly do everything in its power to ensure that this does not happen. All this is a nice consolation for missing out on victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans due to an electric gremlin on the very last lap.
Cool class victory for Cool Racing
Three more Swiss drivers could celebrate a championship title in the European Le Mans Series. Starting from a surprising pole position, the Swiss-flagged Cool Racing team with Alexandre Coigny from Geneva, Nicolas Lapierre from French-speaking Switzerland and Charles Milesi from France took fourth place overall.
The trio thus won the internal Pro-Am classification for the first time. With a 24-point deficit, the title is theoretically still within reach.
In the LMP3 classification, Nicolas Maulini from Geneva leads the standings with his two team partners after finishing second in Spa. Only a rival five points behind could still put a spoke in his wheel.
Podium for Rahel Frey
Rahel Frey celebrated her first podium of the season in the LM-GTE class. Together with Sarah Bovy and Michelle Gatting, the driver from Solothurn achieved a fine third place in the Ferrari 488 GTE Evo from Iron Lynx. After four hours, they were only 46.5 seconds behind the winners. Three Ferraris were in front at the end.
Bad luck for brave Nico Müller
The two Swiss drivers fared less well in the DTM in Assen. Nico Müller had to retire from the first race due to consequential damage to his Audi R8 after a rear-end collision at the start.
On the other day, the Bernese rider put in a fine race to catch up, which brought him up to eighth position. However, six points were less than he had expected.
Nico Müller: "The red flag in qualifying, which only resulted in 15th place on the grid, was bad luck. Because a guest entrant in front of me was not eligible to score points, I got the points for seventh place. I think that was the maximum for us today. Now we have to work on finishing further up the field in qualifying."
The highlights of DTM Race 1 show why Nico Müller and others retired early.
A quartet battles for first DTM GT3 title
Philipp Ellis brought his Mercedes-AMG GT3 from Winward Racing home in fifth place in the first race, which was won by Marco Wittmann in a BMW M6. On Sunday, the Zug native finished twelfth and outside the points. His team-mate Lucas Auer from Austria emerged as the winner.
With two races and four rounds to go, New Zealander Liam Lawson in a Ferrari leads on 175 points ahead of Wittmann (165), the dethroned Kelvin van der Linde (Audi, 160) and Maxi Götz (Mercedes, 155). One of this quartet will probably become champion. Ellis is currently fifth with 109 points, while Müller is only tenth with 55.
Outstanding Lucas Mauron
Lucas Mauron had a dream weekend in the DTM Trophy for GT4 sports cars. On Saturday, the driver from Abtwil scored a hat-trick (pole position, victory and fastest lap in the race) with his Audi R8 LMS.
He almost repeated this coup on Sunday, but had to let Austrian Reinhard Kofler pass him in a KTM X-Bow and finished the race in second place after a tough battle.
With almost the maximum points haul, Mauron moved up to fifth place in the standings, but no longer has a chance of winning the title due to his many zero finishes in the first half of the season. Yann Zimmer (BMW M4) only scored four points in Race 1 and is now sixth overall.
