LAUSITZRING, SPA 24 HOURS, ZOLDER 24 HOURS
Belgium’s premier Porsche team, ProSpeed Competition, is preparing for their summer marathon. Tomorrow the trucks will leave Belgium for round four of the MVD Belcar Championship at the Lausitzring in Germany on July 23rd, after which the team will hurry back to the Ardennes for the Spa 24 Hours, the annual GT fest for which practice starts less than four days after the Belcar race in Germany finishes. Just four weeks after Spa, there is Belgium’s second 24-hour race at Zolder, the main event of the Belcar championship. Or in other words: busy days ahead for reigning Belcar Class 2 Champions who upset the apple cart in 2005 by so nearly winning the championship overall.
The man overseeing all the right troop movements is team co-owner and technical director, Luc Goris.
“Running our usual Belcar 996 RSR in Spa doesn’t require any dramatic changes for the Spa 24 Hours,” he said. “The most obvious changes are of course the extra lights, but other than it is only the endurance-spec brake system that makes the biggest technical difference to our usual Belcar-spec set-up. The engine stays the same, revving at the same number of revs with a gearbox with the usual Spa ratios. The theoretical advantage we have here is that we can run GT1 air restrictors on our engine because we run the so-called National Class (G2), which – again theoretically – should make us faster than a the regular GT2 Porsches. On the downside of running in the National Class, is that the organisers have put both the new factory-built and run Porsche 997 GT3 RSR’s and the BMW Z4M in our class, although they are actually prototypes of future GT2s. So it will be a tall order to go for a podium finish or class win, which is our ambition.”
Nevertheless, the team knows they can count on both Porsche and Michelin to give the best equipment they can technically have. “We have a privileged relationship with Michelin, in that we get the latest development tyres for our lead car. They are not specifically developed for our car, which is quite a bit different from a standard 996 GT3 RSR, but they are of the same compounds and structures,” Goris explained.
At Porsche in Germany, the team is also always welcome for advice from some of the men who have made Porsche the legendary name in sportscar racing it now has. “In the first Belcar race, something in the new sequential gearbox broke, so we sent the complete car back to Weissach,” Goris said.
“When we arrived there, our car was put it in the wind tunnel for half a day, and the people at Porsche immediately gave us some good ideas we could use to improve the aero on our car. Together we worked out an aerodynamic development plan, but since this is the last year for this car we are not going to implement it completely, especially not considering the results we still score in the championship. Also, due to the liberal Belcar regulations, very few standard parts of a 996 GT3 RSR fit on our car.”
The official test day at Spa, early July, saw the debut of rally star François Duval behind the wheel of the second ProSpeed Porsche he shares with Pascal Nelissen Grade, Christian Kelders and Christophe Kerkhove. Needless to say, team and driver were just as anxious to see what the net result would be.
“You immediately see that he’s a top professional,” Goris said. “The kind of questions he asks, the little details he wants to know, like whether he can reverse out of the pit garage himself or whether he has to be pushed. But he immediately settled well within the team and got used to the car in no time. He was more worried about the detachable steering wheel then anything else.”True rallyman that he is, Duval was more eager than anybody else to go out when a downpour hit the track.
“It was quite an interesting experience,” he said afterwards. “It’s a different driving style you need when compared to rally. Here you have to drive as clean as possible, make sure you slide as little as possible. The big difference I still have to get used to is driving behind another car in the rain. In rally we’re not used to driving in spray with zero visibility. But apart from that this day was quite good. The car was well set-up, the team are a nice bunch of people and the faster cars are correct when they overtake you. I really can’t wait for the race.”
But before team and drivers start losing sleep in Spa, there is still the matter of the fourth round of the Belcar championship at the Lausitzring in Germany. Due to a late calendar change, the race now takes place less than four days before the team is expected to qualify for the Spa 24 Hours.“It isn’t an ideal situation of course,” Goris explained, “especially with the German track being nearly 1,000 kilometres from Spa, which costs us a day in travel. One of our trucks will therefore travel to the Lausitzring via a small detour over Weissach to pick up the race engines for Spa. We will in any case only need to prep one car for Spa, as the second Spa-car is our usual spare. Should something untoward happen in the Belcar race, then we’ll just have to work hard to get everything back in shape a few days later. But if a team can rebuild a car in a day in Le Mans, then I’m sure our guys will have no problem with doing it in two or three.”
For the Belcar race itself things might look a bit more difficult for the lead ProSpeed car. “We’ll have to run 40kgs success ballast, having won two out of three rounds so far,” Rudi Penders said. “And the BMW will lose some weight since they had not such a successful race last time out. But the track is new to everybody, so a lot will be down to the drivers. What we will not do is race with the Spa 24 Hours in the back of our minds. We will race as hard as we always do and just see what happens. But it would certainly be good to come back with a third straight win under our belt!”
