Mind the gap: the Dane Train is approaching
Ahead of the Le Mans 24 Hours this weekend, James Attwood finds out from GTE hotshots Marco Sørensen and Nicki Thiim why Danes love racing for Aston Martin
ou might not expect Denmark to be a hotbed of motorsport talent, but the country has in recent years produced a surprising number of sports car drivers. And, for reasons that nobody can quite explain, a lot of them having ended up racing for Aston Martin.
The Dane Train, as it has become known, first ran in 2012, when Christoffer Nygaard, Kristian Poulsen and Allan Simonsen teamed up in the Le Mans 24 Hours’ GTE Am division in an Aston Martin Racing Vantage GTE. Since 2016, the Dane Train has comprised Marco Sørensen and Nicki Thiim, who won the GTE Pro division of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) that season and currently lead the 2019/20 standings in their Vantage AMR. The pair, joined by veteran Brit Richard Westbrook, are among the favourites for a class victory at Le Mans this weekend.
YWhy is Denmark such fertile breeding ground for Aston Martin drivers? “It’s hard to explain,” shrugs Sørensen. “It has just become a thing. It’s hard to beat the Dane Train, you know.” Thiim was the first of the duo to join Aston. He became part of the Dane Train when he was a Porsche GT3 driver, drafted in to race in selected events following the tragic death of Simonsen in a crash at Le Mans in 2013. “Denmark has always produced good racing drivers from when my father [Kurt Thiim] and John Nielsen were driving, then Jan Magnussen and Tom Kristensen, and now it’s Marco, me and more,” he says. “I guess the Danish have a good mentality for endurance racing.”
Despite their shared nationalities, Thiim and Sørensen arrived at Aston in very different ways. While Thiim, 31, worked his way up the sports car ranks in the Porsche Supercup and various GT categories, 29-year-old Sørensen was a
need superstars; sometimes you just keep the group together and perform better as a team, and the chemistry between Marco and me means we just know what we have to do. We really gain and take a lot from each other.”
Sørensen adds: “We’re both super-competitive, but if he’s quicker in one race, I’m not making excuses. We’re happy if the other is quicker, because it’s good for our car. We’re so competitive in everything we do, but we know how to push each other and not get on each other’s nerves.”
Such trust helps when sharing a car in an endurance event, says Sørensen: “When you go to sleep, you’re not thinking ‘will the car end up in the wall?’. A lot of driver pairings, even if they’ll never admit it, get too competitive within their own car and forget that it’s the result of the car that counts.”
This season, the Dane Train’s results have been very good, with three wins in the six events held so far in the 2019/20 FIA WEC – a season that began in July last year. It was due to conclude at Le Mans in June but, due to the coronavirus pandemic, has been extended until Bahrain in November. With two races left and this weekend’s Le Mans counting for double points, Thiim and Sørensen have a 19-point lead over Porsche duo Michael Christensen – another Dane – and Kévin Estre.
It’s a big improvement over the 2018/19 campaign, when the pair managed just a single race win in the then new Vantage AMR, hampered by a rule requiring teams to run a single tyre compound for the full season. “With the new car and switching from Michelin to Dunlop, we didn’t get enough testing and ended up struggling with tyre degradation,” says Sørensen. The best example was Le Mans, when the pair qualified on class pole but knew their tyres wouldn’t last a stint.
While the rules meant that Aston was locked into its package in races, it could test during the season and so focused on ensuring it would have a
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