Team Improves Time and Grid Position In Friday’s Session
After two days of hard work the ProSpeed Competition team is quietly confident for this weekend’s running of the Spa 24 Hours, round 6 of the FIA GT Championship. All four drivers on the team’s lead car – Rudi Penders, Franz Lamot, Bart Couwberghs and rally ace, François Duval – continuously improved their lap times as the team steadily improved the set-up and overall handling of the Porsche 997 GT3 RSR. With a little help from the engineers at both Porsche and Michelin, Bart Couwberghs improved the #60 car’s overall qualifying position in Friday morning’s last qualifying session, despite a slow and dirt track. ProSpeed Competition’s second car – the G3 class 997 GT3 Cup, handled by Christian Kelders and Christophe Kerckhove, two of last year’s class podium finishers, and Christian Lefort and Philippe Greisch – had a faultless practice with the gentlemen-drivers concentrating on finding the right set-up in order to try to emulate last year’s result.
“Our main issue these past two days has been getting the tyres to work,” Technical Director, Luc Goris, said. “We’re running the same Michelin tyres as the IMSA Performance and Ebimotors teams do, which is a whole new given for us, but at the same time a serious appreciation of the quality of work we do. These tyres are completely different to those we had at Monza, so it took a while to get them to work the way they should. Initially we went softer and softer with the set-up as we had done in Monza, but here in Spa it’s quite the opposite; you have to go harder and harder. But the engineers at Michelin and Porsche were very helpful in solving our problem, which is always much appreciated by a privateer team like ours.”
The main attraction for the Belgian fans was of course rally ace, François Duval, who is competing in his second consecutive Spa 24 Hours with the ProSpeed Competition team.
“The good thing this year is that I’ll have to look in my rear view mirrors a lot less than last year,” Duval said. “This car is a lot faster, so it’s just a few of the factory cars and the GT1s that pass you, and these usually do it on the straights, so no worries anymore there. The car is comfortable, a bit too soft to my liking, but with four drivers you always have to find the right compromise. Since it looks like it might rain during the race, I hope I can be helpful there, and maybe help the team to do one better than they did two years ago, when they finished in tenth overall. That, I think, is what we should be aiming for, a top ten finish. To try to go for a class podium finish will be very difficult considering the level of teams and drivers you have in GT2. But then again, Spa in the rain might help us, locals.”
We the handling of the car getting better, Bart Couwberghs was one of the few drivers improving their times in Friday’s last qualifying session. “That was a lot better than yesterday,” he said. “We just kept on working on the car, and still found over a second today, despite the track being slower than yesterday and quite dirty as well. But the car now handles to near perfection. We put on some very old tyres in the first half of this morning’s session and then some new ones and the car responded in the exact same way in both cases, so that’s good news for the race.”
“I’m happy with where we are,” team owner and driver, Rudi Penders, concluded. “We lost some time in the practice sessions by initially going the wrong way in our set-up, but now we have what is probably the best car we can have for a 24-hour race. We’re less than three seconds shy of the best GT2 time, but we can’t compare ourselves with the semi-works teams at the front. One mustn’t forget that this still only our second race with this car, so in that respect we’re quite happy.”
