The Belgian WRT team is the king of strategy, and that helped its BMWs to a 1-2 in a challenging race at Imola
JAMES NEWBOLD
HYPERCARLMGT3
WRT believes that it didn’t have the fastest car in the World Endurance Championship’s LMGT3 class at Imola, but superb race management delivered a first series win for its BMW M4 GT3 as Augusto Farfus, Sean Gelael and Darren Leung led a team 1-2. Their #31 machine, qualified fourth by reigning British GT champion Leung, didn’t hit the front until lap 139 and led for a total of just 46 laps – 72 fewer than the championship-leading Manthey-run PureRxcing Porsche that finished third. But at several junctures in the weather-affected 6 Hours, WRT got the critical decisions right.
First of these was the timing of Leung’s second pitstop on lap 57, when he handed over to Gelael. It came seconds after completing his 1h45m minimum driving time, having been ordered to slow his pace in the closing laps of his double stint to stretch his energy allocation. “We weren’t pegging him back enough,” revealed WRT’s GT programme manager Kurt Mollekens. “So we went, ‘OK Darren, we need to lose six seconds on this lap’ – it was five, but we gave it a bit of margin. He ended up being five seconds, so that was perfect.”
Poleman Alexander Malykhin controlled the early phases in the PureRxcing Porsche and pitted on the same lap as Leung, handing over to Joel Sturm, but was fractionally under on his drive time and would have to return to the cockpit later. An opening-lap safety car called for the Hypercar chaos that required the field to drive through the pits – which doesn’t count towards driving time – was crucial, according to Sturm. “It was [less than] one minute he was to do left in the car, so we were a bit unlucky with that,” he said.
Similarly impacted was Francois Heriau’s AF Corse Ferrari 296. He’d overtaken Leung, but pitted one lap sooner and stayed aboard to trail Sturm, holding up Valentino Rossi (in for Ahmad Al Harthy in the #46 WRT BMW) until the Frenchman eventually swapped to Simon Mann. This offset strategy lifted Gelael to third and, while Mann passed Rossi to take second following the next cycle of stops, he had to stay in the car when WRT could plug in factory drivers Maxime Martin and Farfus – just as the weather began to turn. The timing of the first driver changes had impacted the following stints profoundly. Mollekens noted: “T
