ASTON MARTIN UNTOUCHABLE IN GTE AM
Aston Martin claimed a dominant victory in GTE Am with the Prodrive-run Northwest AMR car of Paul Dalla Lana, David Pittard and Nicki Thiim. Their Vantage
GTE was the quickest car in Am last week, but the introduction of the new biofuel threatened to undermine its chances.
Had the race run its full duration without any cautions, the winning Aston would have needed to make an extra stop. The car couldn’t do a full hour on the fuel allocated to it under the BOP at Sebring. Even after the first stoppage, this might have undone Aston’s chances. Thiim hadn’t met the one-hour minimum drive-time required for the pro driver, which would have forced the team to make an extra stop to put him back in the car had the race restarted.
Dalla Lana starred against his fellow bronze-rated drivers at the start, and Pittard continued the good work on his WEC debut. The car was a minute up the road from its rivals at the first stoppage.
When the race was stopped again, its advantage stood at 45s, though the confused end meant it was credited with a winning margin of more than three minutes over the TF Sport Aston shared by Ben Keating, Marco Sorensen and Florian Latorre.
“The team gave us an amazing car this week,” said Dalla Lana. “I can’t really explain why we were so much quicker than everyone else.”
Porsche prevailed over Chevrolet in a
GTE Pro battle that was engaging rather than thrilling. Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen were classified nine seconds ahead of Nick Tandy and Tommy Milner, although the Porsche 911 RSR had led the Chevrolet Corvette C8.R by half a minute before the race was stopped by lightning for the first time.
The race would almost certainly have been much closer but for its interruptions and early curtailment. The stoppages certainly didn’t play into the hands of the Corvette Racing team’s tyre strategy.
Tandy got the ’Vette up to second ahead of Gianmaria Bruni’s Porsche on lap 16, and then took over the lead after the first round of stops when he didn’t change tyres and Christensen got two new Michelins when he took over from Estre. More to the point, the Chevy driver was just able to hang on in the lead on ageing rubber through to his handover to Milner.
The Porsches, which had qualified 1-2, each lost 15s at the second round of stops, a time penalty for not following the correct procedure at the start: they’d left too much space to the LMP2 pack ahead of them.
That time was made back at the first stoppage, and both Porsches quickly made it past Milner, who was struggling after taking only right-side tyres in the middle of his double stint: “The red really put us on the back foot because I was on pretty old tyres by then. Our strategy kind of unravelled.”
The #92 Porsche led for the remainder of the race after Estre got past Milner. The German car appeared to have the edge as the temperatures dropped in the early evening. But the balance might have switched around had the race gone to the full eight hours. Chevrolet had more fresh tyres in the bank, and might have been able to mount a comeback in the closing stages.
“We saw them doing a double without a tyre change and thought that’s brave and could be a problem for us,” said Porsche’s Alexander Stehlig. “Their strategy could have played into their hands if it had been green flag all the way to the end.”
The #91 Porsche that Bruni shared with Richard Lietz was right with the Corvette before the second red flag, but it wasn’t a match for the sister car after the opening hour. Stehlig couldn’t explain why.
Ferrari was nowhere at Sebring. Neither of the two AF Corse-run factory 488 GTE Evos was within a second of the pace of the winning Porsche and the Chevrolet on the way to fourth and fifth. There was a firm
“no comment” from anyone you cared to ask at Ferrari as to the reasons why.
This time there was no BOP rhetoric from Ferrari. One theory over the lack of speed from the 488s was linked to the switch to a new biofuel introduced by WEC supplier Totalenergies for this season. The fuel has a slightly lower energy content than its predecessor, although the BOP for Sebring was arrived at after running an engine from each manufacturer on the official dyno used by the series.