The Blancpain GT Series community is staying in Great Britain for a second round in England in eight days: after Brands Hatch’s Sprint cup event, which ended with the success of Enzo Ide-Christopher Mies, the Belgian Audi Club Team WRT is moving to Silverstone for the second race of the 2016 Endurance Cup. The track in Northamptonshire shares with Brands the same status of ‘motorsports temple’ but has completely different characteristics. The Belgian squad is hopeful that it will suit their Audis R8 LMS better than Monza, which hosted the Endurance Cup season-opener, and it will allow them to find again the path to the podium. Five cars will be entered, with the same line-ups seen in Italy.
This means that the Vanthoor brothers and Fred Vervisch will share the all-Belgian driven car #1, with Leonard-Meadows-Frijns on car #2, Jimenez-Baptista-Albuquerque in the ‘Portuguese-speaking” car #3 and Kox-de Leener-Käffer in car #4. As at Monza, where it was WRT’s best-placed car (6th), #28 will have at its wheel a trio of stars composed by Will Stevens, Nico Müller and Antonio García.
Team Principal Vincent Vosse analyzes: “It is since the Total 24 Hours of Spa of last year that we haven’t been on the podium of a Blancpain Endurance Cup race and it is time to correct that! We have five excellent cars, five top line-ups and excellent crews. We are eager to show something and close the gap in the championship’s standings. We knew that Monza is not the best-suited track for us, but things should be different at Silverstone. A fast track, with long and fast corners, which, for sure, are more favorable to the architecture and characteristics of our cars. It is also the track that can be more closely compared to Spa, so it will be a very interesting indicator.”
With such a short turn-around in-between Brands and Silverstone, the cars, the trucks and most of the crews stayed in the United Kingdom. As Sporting Director Pierre Dieudonné explains: “We stayed Monday and Tuesday in Brands’ pits, where cars could be serviced, re-prepared and repaired. That was necessary for three out of the five machines. Cars #2 and #3 suffered damage in the race incident they were both involved, but nothing that serious to require repatriation to the factory. Eventually, there was quite some work also on car #1, which suffered contact and a puncture at high speed, but everything is in order for the three of them. Things are organized in such a way nowadays that a professional team can effectively operate far from its basis.”
This noted, the attention can focus exclusively on the sporting aspects. It will be again home race for Stuart Leonard and Michael Meadows, who will seek revenge on Brands’ bad luck, but also for Will Stevens, who could not race in the Sprint Cup last weekend because of his FIA WEC commitments at Spa. “It’s true that Silverstone is pretty close to home”, confirms the former F.1 driver, “and that is obviously very pleasant. But, most of all, it means that it is a track I know very well and enjoy a lot. It will be my first time there with a GT3 car, but that is not an issue. I think the R8 LMS will do well in the high-speed corners, and we’ll try to be among front-runners since qualifying. The level in the Blancpain Endurance Cup is very high this year, and cars seem to have a very similar level of performance, so it is crucial to be competitive as from qualifying. With Nico and Antonio we form quite a good trio and the team is very professional, so we have very good hopes.”
Laurens Vanthoor has a pretty similar view on what the weekend could be: “We have often done well at Silverstone in the past and I think the new R8 LMS should be even better there. The team has tested there not long ago and we have good data. Of course, the competition has also progressed but I believe the level of competitiveness hasn’t changed much in the Endurance series, it is as high as in the last two years. With Fred and Dries, we form a relatively new trio but we are already working very well together. This will be the fourth race this year with Fred, so we are already in sync, and obviously, I know my brother quite well too. Like everybody in the team, I have been positively surprised by his debut with GT cars. He is already very fast. He’s made some mistakes, but that is normal, and we are all there to help him correcting those and making his adaptation process as smooth as possible.”
The event at Silverstone will follow a two-day format, with qualifying taking place on Sunday morning and the 3-hour race kicking off at 3 pm, UK time.
