24 Hours of Spa: Audi triumphs in the Ardennes

Audi was obviously one of the favorites during this 65th edition of the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, the flagship round of the Blancpain Endurance Series. But during qualifying, it was BMW, with its Z4s, which monopolized the first row of the starting grid thanks to the Vita4one Racing and Marc VDS Racing Team teams. During the first hours of racing, the #4 BMW Z3 and the #66 escaped at the head of the race but Mathias Lauda, ​​Greg Franchi and Frank Kechele made it through an early stop during which he had put on slicks, a few laps before the rain falls. The Marc VDS Racing crew encountered starter problems during the night and lost numerous positions in history. It was therefore Audi which took advantage of the situation by placing three of its cars in the first three places. The fight between the No. 16 of Andrea Piccini, René Rast and Frank Stippler and the No. 1 of Christopher Haase, Christopher Mies and Stéphane Ortelli was intense throughout the final hours of the race. But it was ultimately the No. 16 which won with a lap lead over its rival.

In the Pro-Am category, it is the Ferrari 458 Italia n°52 of the AF Corse team which won thanks to the quartet Niek Hommerson-Louis Machiels-Andrea Bertolini-Alessandro Pier Guidi while in the Gentlemen Trophy, the Porsche 997 GT3 Cup S from First Motorsport took the top step of the podium thanks to Steve van Bellingen, Bert Redant, Armand Flumal and Johan Vanloo. The only Cup Class team at the finish, SpeedLover logically won in its category on the Ardennes slide.

Discover the ten-page report on the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps produced by our special correspondents in the next issue of AUTOhebdo, available from Tuesday in digital version for iPad, PC and Mac, and from Wednesday on newsstands.