Tandy completes his set thanks to rain and oil
Porsche ace Nick Tandy added Spa success to his 24-hour wins at Le Mans and the Nurburgring, but needed a little luck
The momentum changed in the dying hours of the Spa 24 Hours. And, predictably for the Belgian venue, it was rain that resulted in the race swinging in the favour of a trio of drivers who’d been downbeat about their chances ahead of the event. Come the chequered flag, the Porsche triumvirate of Nick Tandy, Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor were celebrating a victory that looked a long shot for much of the race.
Their Rowe Racing Porsche 911 GT3-R came into its own when the rain finally arrived in a dose heavy enough to make everyone switch to wet-weather Pirellis. Tandy took over the car from Bamber with a little under three hours to go and began a charge that gave them another victory to go with their 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours triumph, and ensured local hero Vanthoor finally joined the roster of multiple winners at Spa.
The Rowe Porsche was fifth when the race went green after a period of yellows under which it had pitted, with two Audis and two Ferraris ahead. By the time Tandy had got past the second of the Italian cars – the full-factory AF Corse 488 GT3 Evo with Alessandro Pier Guidi at the wheel – he was still 25 seconds down on the race-leading Attempto Audi R8 LMS with Patric Niederhauser at the wheel, and 14s in arrears of the Sainteloc Audi driven by Dorian Boccolacci.
The gap to the leader was down to 14s as Tandy pushed on. His comment afterwards that it was“all or nothing”was borne out by a massive moment in Eau Rouge. The rear-engined Porsche, always a good bet in wet conditions, was increasingly looking like the favourite.
Tandy moved into the lead during a yellow-flag period – a full course yellow that became a safety car, as is the practice at Spa – that began with just under an hour and 20 minutes to go. The Porsche was a couple of seconds up on Niederhauser when the race went green with almost exactly an hour remaining.
The race, also a round of the Intercontinental GT Challenge, was far from over, however. It was neutralised again a couple of laps later, Tandy edging away when the race got going for what turned out to be an
uninterrupted run to the flag. The Porsche still had an advantage on a very wet track, moving into a 4s lead.
But the rain was easing and the balance changing. Niederhauser, who shared Attempto’s factory entry with Frederic Vervisch and Mattia Drudi, started to come back at the Porsche. And then, with a lap and a half to go, something went awry in the Porsche’s transmission. No wonder Tandy described himself as“emotionally wrecked”after the finish and admitted that he burst into tears in the cockpit – a first for him, he insisted – after crossing the line.
“There was big stress for me because I got into the car with three hours to go and I knew I had to do everything I could,”he said.“then, you start the last hour and there’s three cars on your tail and you know you’ve got to be perfect. The stint started wet and we were gapping them a little bit, and then it began to dry out and they were pulling us in by half a second a lap. It was stressful.”
Had not the promised rain belatedly arrived, then Tandy, Bamber and Vanthoor would probably not have added to Porsche’s tally of wins in the Spa enduro. The 911 wasn’t a match for the Audi or the Ferrari in the dry and their Rowe car was, said Tandy only half joking ,“probably the fifth-fastest Porsche ”.
The winning Porsche went backwards through practice and qualifying. It was fifth in opening practice and then ninth in the aggregate qualifying session on Thursday night that determined which 20 cars went through to the Super Pole session. But in the qualifying period that mattered, Vanthoor ended up dog last, more than three seconds off the pace.
The team was initially at a loss to explain the lack of performance, although an issue was found with the right-rear damper. The car started to make its mark in the race in light drizzle on Saturday evening. But when the track dried up, it was probably best described as there or thereabouts, in the mix but not among the favourites.
“Over the second half of a dry stint we were competitive,”said Tandy. “But you only had to look at the fastest laps [the car being nearly a second off the best] to see that we didn’t have the peak performance. That made us vulnerable at restarts on new tyres.”
Crucially, however, Rowe’s tactical nous kept it on the lead lap. It exploited new rules for this year’s GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup allowing more strategic freedom, including the so-called‘ short’ pit stop that allowed for a10s dump of fuel .“we said before the start it was all about staying on the lead lap,”said Tandy.“the team made those short stops under FCY and it kept cycling us to the front. All of a sudden the conditions came to us. When it rained we had the quickest car, at least compared with the cars I was battling with.”
The problem for Tandy was that it wasn’t raining in the final minutes of the race. Niederhauser got the lead down to under two seconds before something broke in the Porsche’s transmission. It might sound strange to say it, but the failure, believed to be a broken driveshaft CV joint, may have won the day for Rowe.
“Unfortunately for our competitors we coated the track in oil and this probably saved us,”explained Tandy.“i had to drive the last lap and a half not going flat out and coasting in the corners. Luckily we could go faster like this than our competitors could driving on our oil.”
Vervisch conceded that the Porsche was simply the faster car when it mattered at the end.“in the full rain, the Porsches were on a different level: it would have been tough to beat them,”said the Belgian, who explained that an electronic glitch that had robbed his Audi of the pitlane speed limiter got worse through the race.“a lot of lights were flashing on the steering wheel by the end.”
The rain, however, did at one point look as though it would play into the hands of the German Attempto team, running with factory backing for the first time. It put Vervisch onto wets right at the end of the 20th hour, which was followed by a frenetic battle between the Belgian and Markus Winkelhock in the slick-shod Sainteloc Audi. They swapped positions four times over the course of eight laps as the weather couldn’t make up its mind what it was going to do.
When it finally started to rain properly, Winkelhock and everyone else on the dry-weather Pirelli control tyre dived into the pits. Vervisch suddenly found himself with a lead of a minute and a half. The team’s bad luck was that it opted bring him in for his next stop just before yet another FCY. The other frontrunners stopped under the yellows and that advantage turned into a 25s deficit to Boccolacci, who’d taken over the Sainteloc car.
The French team’s chances of repeating its 2017 victory disappeared with a tactical call late in the penultimate hour. Whereas the rest of the frontrunning pack came in under the yellows, it left Boccolacci out until the clock hit 65 minutes (the maximum stint length allowed). The other frontrunners all stopped twice during the yellows, their second stops‘short’ones.
The safety car was out by the time the 22-year-old Frenchman, who was drafted into the factory line-up when Audi withdrew its DTM drivers from the event for Covid-related reasons, was able to pit. The time lost because the cars on track are going quicker behind the course vehicle than the 80km/h allowed during an FCY dropped him to fifth. That became sixth for the car Boccolacci and Winkelhock shared with Christopher Hasse by the finish.“it was a bet,”said Sainteloc team manager Frederic Thalamay.“that was our decision and we stuck with it. In the end we cannot say it was the right call.”
The Sainteloc factory entry hadn’t looked like a contender for much of the race. A puncture and a gamble to go to wets in the early-evening drizzle left the car two laps down at one stage, but it was another to use the new tactical freedoms allowed at Spa to claw back time.
Ferrari’s challenge waned in the wet conditions. The factory car Pier Guidi shared with James Calado and Nicklas Nielsen lost out to a pair of Porsches in the final hour. The car that had led the race at the 12-hour mark was third at the final restart. Then Matteo Cairoli took the Dinamic Motorsport Porsche he co-drove with Sven Muller and Christian Engelhart around Pier Guidi in a brave move into Eau Rouge. The best of the pair of 911 GT3-RS run by 2019 Spa winner GPX Racing then made it past right at the death, with Patrick Pilet at the wheel.
Pilet had earlier tagged Sergey Sirotkin in the SMP Racing Ferrari run by AF at No Name Corner, putting the Ferrari the Russian shared with Davide Rigon and Miguel Molina into the barriers. The resulting delay left the Ferrari 19th at the finish.
Neither of the pre-race favourites – the two cars that blocked out the front row – made it to the finish of the race. Raffaele Marciello and Felipe Fraga led at six hours, the first cut-off at which points are awarded, in the Auto Sport Promotion Mercedes-amg that the Italian had put on pole. The car was in the lead group into the 11th hour, but Fraga then lost time with contact with a slower car that knocked the front-left wheel out of kilter, before the brake disc on the same corner exploded. The Brazilian managed to make it back to the pits but, with an hour’s worth of repairs likely, the team decided to call it a day before Timur Boguslavskiy could even drive.
The brush with the backmarker wasn’t the cause of the brake failure. The French team’s Silver Cup entry had already hit the same problem, the team suspecting that the brakes had cooled down too much under the safety car.
Kelvin van der Linde aboard the lead factory WRT Audi had ended up a couple of tenths down on the Merc in qualifying. The car co-driven by Christopher Mies and Dries Vanthoor was running second in van der Linde’s hands when it took a drivethrough penalty for track-limits infringements early in the sixth hour. The car was out of the race before the quarter-way mark was hit with a driveline issue that neither the team nor Audi would specify.
The second factory Audi, into which WRT brought Ferdinand Habsburg, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Dennis Marschall at the start of the week, was never a factor on the way to 14th position. Team boss Vincent Vosse explained that the car had lost performance after its race gearbox and suspension were fitted ahead of Super Pole, and that the analysis as to exactly why had yet to be completed.
Lamborghini was most definitely a contender last weekend, at least for the first 16 or so hours. The FFF Racing Team Huracan GT3 Evo was leading the race by a couple of seconds in Dennis Lind’s hands when he crashed at Eau Rouge. The car co-driven by Andrea Caldarelli and Marco Mapelli had led a large proportion of the first quarter of the race, and had been second at both the six and 12-hour cut-offs.
The Italian manufacturer did, however, salvage something from the weekend with victory in the pro-am class. The British Barwell Motorsport squad scored a third class victory in three years, with father-and-son Rob and Ricky Collard, Sandy Mitchell and Leo Machitski. The team was also leading the Silver Cup division with Alex Macdowall, Patrick Kujala and Frederik Schandorff in the 17th hour when the first named was blamelessly involved in a multi-car incident at Eau Rouge that put the car out of the race. The new Haupt Racing Team, created out of the old Black Falcon set-up, came through to take class honours with its Merc shared by team owner Hubert Haupt, Sergey Afanasiev, Michele Beretta and Gabriele Piana.