The second day of testing for the 2021 Fanatec GT World Challenge powered by AWS season wrapped up today, and in typical style it was the #88 AKKA ASP Mercedes-AMG that topped the results overall.
Jules Gounon was at the wheel of the AKKA ASP machine as he made the perfect start to his new challenge. The French driver posted a stunning time of 1:52.960, making the most of optimum track conditions on Friday morning. The time also meant that this was only car to dip below the 1 minute 53 second lap times over the past two days.
This is also the second year in a row that the team has topped pre-season testing after Raffaele Marciello posted the best effort in 2020. The closing afternoon session on Friday saw Dinamic Motorsport go quickest with its #54 Porsche. The Italian squad placed fourth overall for the test days after Matteo Cairoli’s lap this afternoon.
Gounon edged out the #25 Sainteloc Racing Audi of Alexandre Cougnaud, who showed a very good turn of speed on his first outing with the team. The Frenchman recorded the second-best time of the test, while the sister #26 car of Frédéric Vervisch was fastest on Thursday and third across both days.
As is always the case during test week, there was plenty of news away from the track, too. The full entry list for the 2021 season was released on Thursday morning (25 March), in which it was revealed an expanded grid of 29 cars are set to contest the Sprint Cup and 40 are committed to the Endurance Cup.
Several teams also confirmed their 2021 driver line-ups, with Allied-Racing (Porsche), Garage 59 (Aston Martin), Toksport WRT (Mercedes-AMG), Sainteloc Racing (Audi) and Walkenhorst Motorsport (BMW) all naming impressive very strong line-ups.
Look out for more on these on the site in the coming days and weeks which will culminate in our season preview before the first race in Monza on 16-18 April.