Latest Vantage looking strong
The past two editions of the 24 Hours have disappointed, but now an altogether more competitive operation is primed to win again
Aston Martin has momentum – can it take its first class win since 2017?
That dramatic from-behind victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2017 seems a long time ago now. Aston Martin notched up its most recent class victory in the French enduro more than three years ago when Jonny Adam overhauled Jordan Taylor’s Chevrolet on the final lap to seal the GTE Pro win together with Darren Turner and Daniel Serra. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since.
Aston Martin Racing has produced an all-new car, the World Endurance Championship was temporarily reshaped with the one-off superseason that encompassed the 2018 and 2019 editions of Le Mans, and this year’s race was pushed back into the early autumn. Now, after two disappointing showings at Le Mans, the Prodrive-run AMR squad arrives back at the Circuit de la Sarthe at the head of the points in both the World Endurance
GTE Pro Drivers’ and Manufacturers’ Championships, and looking more than ready to try to add to its tally of class wins at the centrepiece round of the WEC. “Just to be so competitive is a great feeling after the frustrations we’ve encountered at Le Mans in recent years,” says Nicki Thiim, who sits as the head of the GTE Pro points together with Marco Sorensen. “It feels like our time to fight for it.”
Aston wasn’t able to fight for the win in the first two Le Mans appearances of the second-generation Vantage GTE that came on stream at the start of the superseason. Le Mans 2018 was only the second race for the successor to the original Vantage GTE that had its roots in a car raced for the first time back in 2008. Twelve months on, the new car had a couple of GTE Pro victories in the WEC to its name, but still wasn’t ready to take the big one.
The first win for the latest car came in wet conditions at Shanghai and Spa, Thiim and Sorensen winning in China in
“Just to be so competitive is a great feeling after the frustrations we’ve encountered in recent years”
November 2018, and Alex Lynn and Maxime Martin in Belgium in May 2019. The car’s next best results over the course of the superseason, when there were five manufacturers present in GTE Pro, were a couple of fourths. The reason was that the new Vantage wasn’t a competitive proposition in the dry.
The arrival of the new Vantage coincided with strict new tyre limitations in GTE Pro. Double-stinting became a necessity and Aston struggled to make its tyres last.
Aston had swapped from Michelin to Dunlop tyres for the 2016 season. It was looking for what AMR boss John Gaw refers to as a “differentiator” as it strove to keep the ageing mark one Vantage competitive. It worked: Thiim and Sorensen claimed what was then known as the World Endurance Cup for GT Drivers in 2016.
Two years later, it opted to go back to Michelin, the same tyres on which all the opposition ran. The reason for going to Dunlops
had effectively been removed with the arrival of the new car.
But the decision came late in the development programme, and it had long-lasting ramifications.
The return to Michelin was announced on the launch of the new car in November 2017 and the first test on the French rubber wasn’t until the following month. That left only five months before the start of the superseason.
“We started testing in August 2017 and did the first three months on Dunlops,” explains AMR head of performance Gus Beteli, who replaced Dan Sayers as the technical leader across all the GT programmes at the start of this year. “The first test on the Michelins was in Abu Dhabi in December, which left us with a very narrow window for development.”
WEC rules allow for only three specifications of slick tyre across
“It was never going to happen for us at Le Mans last year because we didn’t have the tyre we needed”
a season, leaving little scope for improvement for a period of 18 months. “You have to declare your tyres quite early, so it really was a challenge,” continues Beteli. “We were starting from zero compared with our rivals and we were still in the early stages of development when you are changing the car for performance and reliability.
“We basically ran out of time and our bad luck was that we were heading into the superseason. Our tyres were fixed for 18 months, so that meant we struggled through the first season with the car.”
That struggle continued right up until Le Mans last year. Sorensen proved the one-lap pace of the new Vantage by claiming its second pole position of the season, but the car was nowhere in the race. A Balance of Performance change on the Friday evening robbed the Astons of horsepower, but Beteli concedes that a third victory of the season wasn’t really on the cards.
“It was painful, because we were really just driving around,” says Beteli. “But it was never going to happen for us at Le Mans last year because we didn’t have the tyre we needed.”
Thiim reckons he “still has nightmares” about Le Mans 2019.
“The tyres died on me,” says the Dane, who played a part in bringing in Richard Westbrook to share the #95 ‘Dane Train’ at Le Mans (they drove an Audi together in the 2014 Nurburgring 24 Hours). “We wouldn’t have been competitive even if we hadn’t been done over on the BOP. We knew after one hour of the race that we weren’t going anywhere last year.”
Things changed for the 2019-20 WEC campaign, the first season – and as it has turned out, the last – run to a winter-series format beginning in the autumn of one year and (in theory) finishing with Le Mans the following summer. This time, Aston was able to put in place the kind of development programme with Michelin it needed to ensure the Vantage fulfilled its potential.
AMR began tyre testing for this season’s campaign straight after Le Mans 2018. The result is revised-construction tyres that have allowed the Vantages to race with Porsche and Ferrari right through a double stint. “The tyre lasts through a double, which is what you have to do with the tyre restrictions,” says Thiim. “Everything has come together for the second season with the car.”
The new Aston notched up its first dry-weather podium with Lynn and Martin at the Silverstone series opener in September, before Thiim and Sorensen recorded a maiden dry-weather –albeit with a quick shower – victory at Fuji the following month. They followed that up with two more victories in the bone dry at
Bahrain and Austin in December and February respectively.
And they should have won at Shanghai too.
The Vantage has been there on pace and the AMR crew has been at the top of its game all season. It has played some clever strategic cards in a GTE Pro battle that remains ultra-competitive despite the disappearance of Ford and BMW from the series.
Shanghai was a case in point. Thiim was running second to Kevin Estre’s Porsche 911 RSR when he was brought in five laps early as his pace started to drop on the tyres on which he and Sorensen had qualified. He subsequently flew on fresh rubber and established the car in the lead, only for Sorensen to lose the race in a sequence of events set in motion by a puncture.
The sister car, in which another refugee of the Ford programme in the form of Harry Tincknell joins Lynn and Martin, has so far been the loser in AMR’S tactical play. But as Beteli points out that’s an almost inevitable consequence of splitting your strategies: “One of the calls is going to pay off and one isn’t, so Alex and Max have been a bit unlucky in that respect.”
Beteli reckons AMR’S work on the pitwall and in the pits has been crucial this season. “We’ve won races where we haven’t necessarily been the fastest car on the averages,” he says. “There has been a lot of good work on strategy and in the pits – we’ve been the fastest team in the pits all season. Nicki and Marco have been brilliant: they drive every lap to the limit and leave the strategy to us.”
Thiim believes everything is in place for AMR to return to the winners’ circle. He’s expecting a close fight across an admittedly reduced field missing the new Chevrolet Corvette C8.RS and the two additional Porsches usually fielded by the CORE Autosport IMSA Sportscar Championship squad.
“It’s been super-close so far this season, all the cars separated by a couple of tenths,” says Thiim, “but I’m pretty positive that the team has done all its homework and gathered all the information from this season to be able to manage the tyres and be in the game all the way. I’m confident we can be right there and bring it to Porsche and Ferrari.
“If it’s not this year, I don’t know when it is going to be.
I don’t think there’s much more we could have done to make sure we’re ready to win.”