CRAFT-Bamboo wins rainy Race 2 at Shanghai


CRAFT-Bamboo Racing made good use of strategy in a critical moment and won the Race 2 of the Blancpain GT Series Asia event at Shanghai, with the considerably wet track being on favor of Darryl O'Young and Marvin Dienst.

The track was way wetter than on Saturday, and to secure that everything is safe the Safety Car kept its way on track for six minutes until the green flag was out, when Alessio Picariello in the No. 7 Absolute Audi was leading an all-Audi top-3 while Marvin Dienst in the No. 99 CRAFT-Bamboo Porsche was trying to break this with lots of pressure into the No. 13 Milestone Audi.

Things were settled until the 20-minute mark when the No. 13 became second and Congfu Cheng clocked some best laps in sequence, although it wasn't enough to catch Picariello. Right after the pit window opened the No. 75 T2 Ferrari made contact with the No. 30 Absolute Bentley, which proved to be terminal to the Italian car and brought a Full Course Yellow for around five minutes.

J-Fly by Absolute let Picariello have as much track time as possible before delivering the No. 7 to Jeffrey Lee, but truth is that the Full Course Yellow ruined their plans to be in front as the No. 99 CRAFT-Bamboo Porsche took the lead while the former first place holder went down to seventh place. Pretty much everything benefited the No. 99, with a gap of 9 seconds to the No. 6 R8 LMS Cup Audi and also a faster pace than the opponents.

In the final minutes the weather worsened considerably and this helped the No. 99 into securing the lead gap and open it even more, so Darryl O'Young just had to bring it home to celebrate the overall win, as well in the Silver Cup. The No. 6 R8 LMS Cup Audi crossed in second and won the Pro-Am Cup and a late effort of the No. 86 OD Racing Audi brought the third spot for them.

The No. 2 FFF Lamborghini got Am Cup honors with Junhan Zhu and Yue Lin at the wheel while in GT4 Taiwan Top Speed with the No. 17 Porsche of Keo Chang and Jeff Lu did a good job in the bad weather while the rest of the field couldn't match the pace and made small mistakes during the race.


The next weekend will be also the last of the inaugural season as the competitors will face the new Zhejiang Circuit in China for the first time on October 21st and 22nd.

PHOTO: CRAFT-Bamboo Racing

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