Strategy was part of
the first Blancpain GT
win of the 2016 season, as Bentley
M-SPORT played the right tactics to
receive victory in the end of the Qualifying Race of the Sprint Cup
at Misano with Andy Soucek
and Maxime Soulet.
Green flag was waved
and Laurens Vanthoor
acted quickly to keep his dominant position while Alvaro
Parente kept looking for opportunities.
The Audi R8 was a particularly strong machine in the Italian track,
as Robin Frijns and Markus Winkelhock made their moves to climb up
the table.
With 5 minutes of
racing Frijns saw the chance to go to second place, but he went too
wide to defend himself and Parente recovered briefly, to be pressed
by a group of cars a little later on. Frijns successfully went to
second then, and Norbert Siedler
was also quick to get third place in the mess, leaving Maximilian
Buhk as the guy to make Parente
worried. Eventually the Portuguese driver lost more position, being
relegated to seventh.
Norbert Siedler
eventually got confident to attack Frijns, but after failing to
overtake, the No. 333 Ferrari 488 GT3 saw the No. 84 Mercedes of Buhk
blast past him. Buhk tried a move into Frijns in the same point as
Siedler did, failed, and started to see the big Ferrari front end in
his mirrors. For Buhk it was a question of attacking the No. 4 Audi
and defend from the No. 333 Ferrari. Buhk passed Frijns in the last
corner and so did Siedler, but the Dutch WRT
Audi driver kept the combat on, taking back his third position.
Frijns was still
cornered by Siedler, to the point that on lap 13 with 23 minutes of
racing, the No. 4 Audi couldn’t resist the pressure and Siedler
went to third place.
The track was now
favorable for a set of slick tires, so some cars went to the pits
early to just put new rubber. The leader No. 1 Audi entered a lap
later, and while that HTP Motorsport worked in the No. 84 car,
returning to track almost in the same time.
Surprise then came
out from Bentley and BMW, as Andy Soucek managed to get the lead and
deliver it to Maxime Soulet in the No. 8 M-SPORT Bentley machine,
while Alexander Sims
did the same to Philipp Eng
in the No. 99 ROWE Racing
BMW, with a debris yellow flag coming as a help. To the once leader
No. 1 Audi now was in third, almost 30 seconds behind with Frederic
Vervisch needing to fight back.
Near the end of the
third quarter of racing, Soulet was in a messy situation trying to
lap the Attempto Racing Lamborghini with Eng fancy of an overtake,
but then the second yellow flag came after a contact between Alex
Buncombe and Stuart Leonard, with the No. 2 Audi hitting the wall
hard and Leonard having to retire.
11 and a half
minutes remaining to the finish and the green flag was waved again
with Soulet being pressed by Eng, but Soulet’s problem was that the
Attempto Lamborghini was still ahead of him. After some negotiations,
the front pack passed him and the fight continued. Eng was flashing
his lights against Soulet while slight mistakes happened in the
Bentley side. But it was Eng’s woes with the backmarkers that
decided the race in favor of Soucek, with Eng in second and Vervisch
in third. The No. 19 GRT Lamborghini won in the Silver Cup category
while the No. 11 Kessel Racing Ferrari took Pro-Am honors.
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