Concentrating On Belgian Belcar Series and Spa 24 Hours in First Year
A new, Belgian GT team, ProSpeed Competition, was launched at the Porsche Centre in Liège, Belgium on Saturday. Brainchild of a group of people around the reigning Belcar class champions, Rudi Penders and Franz Lamot, the team was born out of the ambition to create a professional race team with a long-term vision and the will to succeed.
After coming close to winning the Belcar series title overall last year, Belcar stalwart, Rudi Penders, owner of the Porsche Centre Liège and twice Belcar champion in the GTB class in 2002 and 2005, made the decision to create his own team together with GT and touring car specialist, Luc Goris. “It has always been a childhood dream to one day have my own team,” Penders said.
“After a sabbatical in 2004 for professional reasons – bar for a few club races – I decided to go racing again last year with Franz Lamot, the 2003 GTB class champion who had had a disappointing season in ‘04. I still owned the Porsche 911 GT3 RS with which I finished second in the championship in 2003, and decided to let Luc Goris’s TT Racing do the actual running, taking it one race at the time. However, we immediately were competitive as well as reliable, to the point of almost winning the overall title, beating Corvettes, Vipers and turbo Porsches in the process. In the end, we only missed the overall title by one place in the last race, but even so our season was more successful than we could have hoped for eight months earlier.”
Having been so successful for many years in the smaller GTB class, the logical next step would be to graduate to the GTA class with a bigger and more powerful car. Not so Rudi Penders and Luc Goris. “Rather than spending lots of time and money on preparing a new car, we decided to invest these resources in our own team, something which we had been thinking about before,” Penders said. “We will have two Porsches in the MVD Belcar Championship and two in the Spa 24 Hours. The lead car will be driven by me and Franz Lamot, while the second car will be crewed by two gentleman drivers, Pascal Nelissen Grade and Christian Kelders. For the Spa 24 Hours, both drivers’ line-ups will be joined by third drivers still to be announced.”
International CampaignNever men to do half a job, Penders and Goris are already working on plans for 2007 and beyond. “Ideally, ProSpeed Competition would like to expand both in terms of series as in terms of tools. The plan is to be in a position to get invited to the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2007, a race which I discovered in 2000 when I finished fifth in class with Kurt Dujardyn and the late Phillip Verellen.”
An invitation to the world’s most famous endurance race is not something a team gets for free, something everybody at ProSpeed is very well aware of. “Today, getting an invitation for Le Mans isn’t as easy as it maybe once was, and justifiably so,” Goris said. “The starting grid is almost entirely made up of proven race and series winners, so the quality in depth is very high indeed. So, in order to have as big a chance as possible to be on the starting grid in La Sarthe in 2007, we will embark on an international campaign next year. While we don’t know yet which series this will be,it will in any case be a series in which we can play a prominent role with the car or cars we will then run in the class or category these cars will be eligible for.”
Favourites AgainWhile Le Mans and an international campaign are still a year away, there is still the matter of defending the Belcar Class 2 title to be settled. With Penders having won the title in 2002 (with Marc Goossens) and 2005 (with Franz Lamot), and finishing second in 2003, and with Lamot winning the GTB class in 2003 (with Bart Couwberghs) and 2005, it is difficult to imagine a stronger pairing to the job. “It is nice to be the favourites,” Franz Lamot concluded, “and while we probably have little to prove on the track, we still have a lot to prove in order to establish ProSpeed Competition as a household name on the racing scene in Belgium. But with the people and partners committed to our projects we are quietly confident we will manage to do so.”
While the lead car is the clear favourite for the Class 2 title, the second car shouldn’t be far off the pace either. With Pascal Nelissen Grade, Belgium’s fastest lawyer, and Luxemburg driver, Christian Kelders behind the wheel, this car will count on the duo’s proven reliability for their first full season in the Belcar Championship. “As a gentleman driver, I couldn’t have asked for a better environment to do my first full Belcar season,” said Nelissen Grade, a class podium finisher with Porsche in the Spa 24 Hours in 2003. “Our mission this year will be to secure the rear guard as it were and finish as high as possible by being consistent.”
For their 2006 campaigns, ProSpeed Competition can count on the support of CPL Trans (trucking), State of Art (high-end fashion and supplier of ProSpeed’s official team clothing), Interoffice (office supplies) and dailysportscar.com (the world’s leading sportscar news website). Technical partners pledging their support are Michelin tyres, Moton shock absorbers and Porsche Motorsport.
2006 PROSPEED COMPETITION SCHEDULE
April 6th MVD Belcar Championship Launch, ZolderApril 9th MVD Belcar Round 1: SpaMay 21st MVD Belcar Round 2: ZolderJune 29th MVD Belcar Round 3: ZolderJuly 23rd MVD Belcar Round 4: Eurospeedway LausitzJuly 29th-30th FIA GT Round 4: Spa 24 HoursAugust 26th-27th MVD Belcar Round 5: Zolder 24 HoursOctober 8th MVD Belcar Round 6: SpaOctober 22nd MVD Belcar Round 7: Zolder
