“It was the [second-]best of times, it was the worst of times…”
[This has been your daily serving of “Boring Platitudes as Story leads.] So goes the saga of a two-car team in endurance racing, as Chip Ganassi Racing UK and Ford explored last weekend at the second round of the FIA World Endurance Championship at Spa Francorchamps in Belgium. Fresh off a Ford class win in the IMSA series stateside less than a week before, the #67 Ford GT came across the finish line second place in the GTE-PRO class, marking their second podium in just six days. However, the team’s #66 GT perhaps the bigger story, having been totaled in a massive impact at the notorious Eau Rouge corner less than an hour before the race’s end.
The #66 car had undergone problems with one of the turbochargers on the Ford’s twin-turbo 3.5-liter V6, but after a lengthy repair, Stefan Mücke took the #66 back on track to get in some more laps. As Mücke climbed the high-speed turn at Eau Rouge, the rear end stepped out and the car clattered mercilessly into the tire bundles atop the hill at Raidillon corner before coming to a rest with carbon fiber pieces everywhere. Emergency crews extracted Mücke and took him to the circuit’s medical facility, where he was found to have no injuries aside from bruising.
At the time, the sister #67 car was third place behind the two AF Corse Ferrari 488s by a lap with the Aston Martin closing. After a late-race restart, Marino Franchitti managed the gap behind to the Aston, running just quickly enough to outpace Jonny Adam in the #97 car, which finished just a second behind. In the meantime, the class-leading #51 Ferrari suffered an engine or turbo failure with just nine minutes remaining after dominating the race. That promoted the #71 Ferrari to its second win of 2016 with Ford moving to second place, a good confidence boost after the huge hit Mücke suffered just minutes earlier.
Elsewhere in the race, the #8 Audi R18 won an incredible war of attrition at the front of the field that saw the second-place #2 Porsche 919 run nearly the entire race with a broken hybrid drive system (essentially a 500+ horsepower handicap). Both of the factory Toyotas suffered from engine trouble, one Audi suffered undertray damange and overheating issues, and the second Porsche had a failed front gearbox (mated to the front-axle hybrid motors). Those troubles for the factory LMP1 teams gave a long-deserved overall podium to the privateer #13 Rebellion Racing R-One.
In one of the most incredible moments of the race, the #5 Toyota returned to take the checkered flag despite having a blown engine. The Toyota creeped along solely under hybrid power to take the finish last. This actually matters because they completed enough laps to be classified as finishers in the race, allowing them to take home fifth-place points in the WEC manufacturers championship.
For the LMP2 class, the strategic chess game was impossible to parse until the closing minutes with Nicolas Lapierre making the winning pass in spectacular fashion as the clock wound down. Lapierre and Luis Felipe “Pipo” Derani split around the #67 Ford after both struggled to get around the slower-class car for some time. and it was Lapierre who outmaneuvered Derani for the first spot. Derani hung on to finish second in class, meaning the talented young Brazilian has still not finished off the podium with American-owned Extreme Speed Motorsports this year. Derani won the 24 Hours of Daytona, won the 12 Hours of Sebring, and finished second at the WEC opener at Silverstone.
