Ferrari brings out GT big guns
Ex-williams Formula 1 driver Sergey Sirotkin will move into the GT ranks with Ferrari in this year’s GT World Challenge Europe as part of an expanded attack by the Italian manufacturer on the series.
The Russian, who has been retained in his reserve role with the Renault F1 team for 2020, will drive one of two Ferrari 488 GT3 Evos run by the AF Corse squad in the Endurance Cup segment of the GTWCE. He is joining five Ferrari factory drivers for the assault on the four-race contest known until last year as the Blancpain GT Series.
Sirotkin will drive a car entered under the banner of Russian entrant SMP Racing alongside Davide Rigon and Miguel
Molina, who finished runners-up in the series last year together with Mikhail Aleshin. The sister car will be shared by James Calado, Alessandro Pier Guidi and new Ferrari signing Nicklas Nielsen.
Long-time SMP driver Sirotkin has joined its GT programme after irregular appearances in its prototypes over the past four seasons. He raced at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2017 and 2019, respectively driving an LMP2 Dallara-gibson P217 and an LMP1 BR Engineering BRE-AER BR1.
Sirotkin said: “I am very motivated to be a part of the SMP Racing crew together with my team-mates Miguel and Davide and achieve the highest results.”
Ferrari is billing its 2020 GTWCE programme as an “increased engagement” in the GTWCE. It will be the first time that AF, Ferrari’s works GTE Pro team in the World Endurance Championship, has mounted a full attack on the series in the pro class under its own flag.
The GTWCE will kick off with the Imola enduro on 26 July with 42 full-season entries. That’s down on the 54 cars originally registered, but series boss Stephane Ratel still described the series as “very healthy” in the face of the delayed start to the season resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. “The endurance grid is still a big field, which is absolutely comparable to last year,” he said. “There has been an impact [of COVID-19] that we can’t ignore, but we started at such a high level with a record entry.”
He suggested that, with race-by-race entries, the field could still hit 50 cars at Imola. The season-long entry for the Sprint Cup, which begins on 8-9 August, has shrunk from 33 to 23 cars.