GT3 Europe

ProSpeed Competition experience difficult English FIA GT3-weekend

© Planetlemans – Marcel ten Caat

With just quarter of an hour from the finish of the second race of the FIA GT3 Championship in Silverstone it looked as though ProSpeed Competition were about to book a first European GT3 victory. Paul Van Splunteren had a comfortable lead, following a brilliant stint by Marco Holzer and the Porsche 911 GT3 R was running like Swiss clockwork. “But unfortunately Paul just touched a dirty part of the track and went off.

The disappointment was enormous, both for him as also the rest of the team. The entire weekend went off in a crescendo, but unfortunately didn’t end in a climax”, is how Rudi Penders looked back on the European GT3 weekend. Van Splunteren and Holzer could not do better than two points in the first race, and two eleventh places for the Finns Petri Lappalainen and Markus Palttala was the best the team could come home with.

Qualifying
Marc Holzer immediately put his seal on the GT3 environment, with a fifth place in the second qualifying session, a mere half a second from the pole position. The young German registered his best qualifying result for the Liège-based team, but in addition the two gentleman drivers, Petri Lappalainen and Paul Van Splunteren also came up trumps with respectively an 11th and a 9th place.

“In all honesty we are both making our debut in this European GT3 Championship and in this highly competitive field you must admit that this is a pretty reasonable result”, Paul van Splunderen, the Dutch Porsche concessionaire commented. Only Markus Palttala, who took on the second session, was not satisfied. “Due to a technical problem I lost driving time, and had trouble during my ideal fast lap”, Markus Palttala added. “I could definitely have clocked up a faster time.”

Races
“A combination of circumstances meant that for the opening race of the season we weren’t able to get the best out of the race”, Rudi Penders explained after the first race.
“It might have been that the set-up was not perfect and that our drivers were caught up in traffic, but there probably are a few other explanations for those ninth and eleventh places. Overall the result is not that bad, taking into account a field comprised out of 30 evenly matched cars and teams, but I had hoped for more, that’s a fact.”

In race 1 Holzer and Van Splunteren scored two points with their ninth place, whilst Petri Lappalainen and Markus Palttala, finishing eleventh, were just out of the points.
The following day the Finnish duo scored the same result. “But in this race we came up from 20th place on the grid, and were also penalised with a drive-through for a problem during the start procedure”, the younger of the two Finns commented. “I’m fully convinced that had it not been for that we could have finished up in the top-5.” In the meanwhile up front it looked as though Paul Van Splunteren was well on his way to a first victory, but a skid some fifteen minutes from the finish put an end to that.

ProSpeed Competition is now travelling back to Belgium to prepare for the 1000 Km of Spa taking place next weekend. A preview regarding this classic race in the Belgian Ardennes will be available in the coming days.