Surprisingly, heavy rain at around 1am in the morning didn't add to the number of retired cars: with wet tyres fitted it looked like most drivers slowed to a sensible pace and went into survival mode in the pitch black. With the late afternoon start of 4pm the previous day, it's sometimes difficult to process that in a race this long the dead of the night is barely halfway through the 24 hours you have to get through. The bad news was that as the track dried around 4am, drivers got back to their bad old ways: two more Porsches buried themselves in the barriers in quick succession – one out on the spot, the other added to the list of walking wounded. Around 6am the skies started lightening and the 45 remaining cars from the 62 starters emerged into a gloomy dawn.
?Although endurance tyres are obviously constructed much more robustly than sprint rubber, the track was littered with debris off-line. With so much overtaking required in such a packed field risks had to be taken to get past slower traffic.
Dawn had also brought Claudia Hurtgen back into the battle, as she was well enough to rejoin her co-drivers, Dirk Werner and Edward Sandstrom, in the #76 Team Need For Speed BMW Z4.
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This year was the first time I'd walked up the outside of the long Kemmel straight, the one actually straight piece of track at Spa that leads from Eau Rouge/Raidillon to the chicane at Eau Rouge. It provides spectacular views over the forests, with the track visible in the distance, snaking its way through the trees.
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Spa is an amazing place for spectators: you can walk round almost the entire track, mostly on elevated banks that give you a great view of the track below. There are even photo holes cut in the fences for fans, which I've never seen at other tracks, and even sections of track that don't give great close-in shots provide amazing vistas when you pull back wide.
However, not everyone at the track was that interested in the racing…
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FIA GT3 regulars Graff had brought their pair of SLSs to Spa: the #54 car with F1 driver Olivier Panis on the roster sported a bare carbon nose for most of its race after a crash; the #55 seemed to spend more of its time in the gravel than on the tarmac… Both cars were officially retired with just two hours to go.
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The Dutch/Belgian KRK team's pair of Mercedes SLSs had mixed fortunes: the Pro car was knocked out during the night, but the Pro-Am #16 finished an appropriate 16th.
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Vita4One was not having a race to remember, with both Pro Ferrari 458s out (one retired, one excluded) by 11am on Sunday morning. #1 was retired after numerous attempts to fix gearbox trouble and accident damage.
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The exclusion was particularly galling for the team: Louis Machiels in #2 (sharing with multiple GT1 champions Michael Bartels and Andrea Bertolini) was black-flagged for a pit-lane violation – and didn't see the flag. Or hear the radio calls. Or the mechanics frantically waving and holding out IN IN IN on their pit-board. The exclusion was from third place, and with just five hours of racing remaining… The team were absolutely apoplectic with anger – like the #74 Prospeed Porsche driver, I doubt he'll be invited back to the team…
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Marc VDS had started with three different cars: their new BMW Z4, Ford GT and Ford Mustang. A broken diff put paid to the pole-sitting Z4, which had in any case suffered problems in the first hour of the race that dropped it right to the back.
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The GT and Mustang soldiered on slowly but reasonably reliably: 11th place for the GT wasn't a bad result in the end; the Mustang has never excelled at long-distance racing, and a finish – albeit it back in 28th and a 100 laps down – was in itself a result for the big car.
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The two Faster Racing Z4s were another team who put in a solid rather than spectacular performance. They were another team to have an intra-team clash on-track: the two cars collided with each at the exit of the Bus Stop chicane early in the race but managed to continue with only bodywork damage.
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The crumpled nose of the #43 Z4 was held together by black tank tape after that…
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The small GT4 class had been comfortably led by the Lotus Evora until it suffered an engine failure – that allowed the RJN Nissan 370Z through to win.
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The incongruous BMW M3 in the race finished second in class – but had a inglorious role to play in the main GT3 race as it was involved in the accident that took out the #59 McLaren in the first hour.
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McLaren's trio of orange MP4-12Cs had looked stunning in the flesh – not so good in the barriers. The BMW turned across the McLaren's bows on the run down from La Source to Eau Rouge, and the MP4-12C speared off left to end in a car-destroying crash against the armco. At least #60 did cross the line after the 24 hours were up.
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With so many cars it was surprising that there weren't more safety cars than we saw: marshals often had to work in perilous conditions under waved yellow flags to get cars moved out of the way to evade the need for a safer car period, which inevitably break up the flow of the race. The Speed Lover Aston Martin in GT4 had rolled to a halt at Les Combes during the second hour. I watched the driver desperately try to get the car restarted – to no avail. Another car with a very short 24 hour race. It's a sad thing to witness.
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As the race due to a close the struggle to keep cars looking and running well was reduced to pure survival for many entrants. Cars struggled round trailing bodywork or missing whole sections as spares ran out – or expediency meaning it would just take too long to change.
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Teams monitored their cars that were trailing smoke, desperately hoping that they would make it to the end.
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Predictably, show cars in the paddock were gradually stripped over the course of the race to provide donor parts to their sisters on track. This Porsche Cup car was pretty much a shell by the end, victim of the travails the #161 Freeman Gepa Porsche had been suffering. Despite all these carbon donations, out on track the race car was still apparently held together by tank tape and luck. Similarly, a 458 GT3 display car was missing another part each time I passed it!
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Third-place finishers Black Falcon, with their #35 SLS AMG done up in the colours of the Mercedes that won their class of the Spa 24 Hours 40 years ago, profited from cars in front retiring – but that's not luck in a 24 hour race. The SLS had been driven hard (and still sported the accident damage from when it was speared by a WRT Audi) but played the long game and reaped the result.
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Team NFS just didn't get the break they needed to make back the time that they'd lost to the #33 Audi by starting so far back after a bad qualifying, but could be very happy at such a sterling drive to get up to second.
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Surprisingly, this is a race that Audi have never previously won. Like at Le Mans their challenge came down to one car by the end, and similarly it was the efficient driving just within the limit that guaranteed the #33 R8's win.
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Stephane Ratel, who runs the FIA GT and Blancpain series, also held a press conference over the weekend on the future of GT racing – with Spa and GT1 getting particular attention. Big things are mooted for 2012 – Ratel mentioned the possibility of 75-80 cars at Spa, again with the simple, effectively two-class structure of this year (GT3 and GT4). 25 per cent more cars, 25 per cent more exciting? I'm not sure we could handle it! We'll be back with the Team Need For Speed's BMW at the next FIA GT3 race in Slovakia later this month – in the meantime, be sure to check out the race highlights from Spa.
Spa 24 Hours Class Winners
PRO: #33 Audi Sport Team WRT R8 LMS (Greg Franchi/Mattias Ekstrom/Timo Scheider) 545 laps
PRO-AM: #20 SOFREV ASP Ferrari 458 Italia (Franck Morel/Jean-Luc Beaubelique/Ludovic Badey/Guillaume Moreau) 530 laps
GENTLEMEN'S TROPHY: #19 Level Racing Porsche 997 GT3 Cup S (Brody/Christophe Corten/Mathijs Harkema/Kurt Dujardin) 493 laps
GT4: #63 RJN Nissan 370Z (Alex Buncombe/Jordan Tresson/Christopher Ward) 476 laps
CUP: #56 RMS Porsche 997 GT3 Cup (Marc Faggionato/Thierry Prignaud/Thierry Stepec/Franck Racinet) 470 laps
Jonathan Moore
Royal Automobile Club Of Belgium
OFFICIAL SPEEDHUNTERS SUPPLIERS
Good thing the NFS Z4 didn't have any accident or did it?
Great pictures!
This year's coverage was brilliant! Pictures are top notch too.