Strakka Racing will be hoping to bounce back at the Six Hours of Spa-Francorchamps after a disappointing opening round to the FIA World Endurance Championship.
The team’s Honda Performance Development ARX-03c endured a tough home event at Silverstone, despite moving from 30th on the grid up to 7th in just six laps, as two hours in to the six-hour race, an incident with a GT car ended their day prematurely.
“We were disappointed with our result at Silverstone,” said Team Manager Dan Walmsley, “but what happened in the race was out of our control – so we head to Spa knowing we have a fast car and the ability to deliver a good result and get our championship challenge back on track. Like all Michelin runners, we’ll have a new evolution tyre at Spa, which I’m confident our engineering team will quickly get on top of in terms of performance and durability. We’d like to do more running in the dry, but that’s not often the case at Spa – but come rain or shine, we’re feeling positive and quietly confident ahead of race weekend.”
The Spa event, a favourite for the team’s all-British line up, Jonny Kane, Danny Watts and Nick Leventis, will be one of the most intense in WEC history, with the normal three day timetable condensed into just two. Both practice sessions and the two-driver, four-lap aggregate qualifying session held on Friday before Saturday’s race.
“I always look forward to racing at Spa, and as a team we’ve always done well there.” said Leventis. “We did more dry running in the race at Silverstone than we did in all our pre-season testing, so we learnt a lot about our new car in those fifty-eight laps. The weather is getting warmer, and whilst changeable conditions are part and parcel of a Spa race weekend, all being well we should have less trouble keeping the heat in the front tyres. The new two-day race forward shouldn’t be a problem.
“I doubt we’ll have any mechanical issues, we very rarely do, so we need to try and avoid any incidents out on track to make sure we start the race having done as much running as possible around Spa. We take a lot of positives from Silverstone into round two of the WEC, and I’m really looking forward to it.”
