Despite setbacks, PROsport Racing was able to finish on the podium in the GT4 European Series at Spa-Francorchamps. The team continues with the ADAC GT4 Germany at the Nürburgring, where three Aston Martin cars will be entered for the first time.
The biggest GT4 race weekend to date lies behind PROsport Racing. No less than 55 GT4 cars took to the grid on the Ardennes roller coaster as part of the 24-hour race. For PROsport Racing, drivers Hugo Sasse and Mike David Ortmann as well as Rodrigue Gillion and Nico Verdonck again drove the two Vantage GT4s.
Unusually for SRO, the BoP was adjusted several times for the race weekend. “But in the end, there was a balanced starting field,” confirms team boss Christoph Esser. In the starting phase of the first race, Sasse and Ortmann’s car fought its way into a strong position. But after an incorrect calculation of the pit time, the vehicle fell far behind in the rankings. After a strong recovery in the final phase, Sasse saw the chequered flag in eleventh place in class and thus remained without points. Things went better in the second race, when the driver duo managed to score a second-place finish and missed out on victory by just 0.4 seconds in front of the large crowd of long-distance fans.
“In the first race, our team made a fatal mistake in calculating the pit stand time, which cost us a lot of points in the fight for the championship. I am infinitely sorry for Mike and Hugo, because the two show every weekend that you belong to the best GT 4 drivers in Europe,” said team boss Esser after the race weekend.
The car of the two local heroes Nico Verdonck and Rodrigue Gillion drove in the first race on rank twelve in the Pro-Am class. In the second race on Saturday morning, it was good enough for sixth position.
After the race weekend in the Ardennes, Ortmann and Sasse are fourth overall in the Silver Cup, with the two Belgians eleventh in the Pro-Am class. “But we’re not admitting defeat in this championship yet either, because the next stop is Hockenheim and with a bit of luck we’ll get the missing points back there,” concludes Christoph Esser.
For PROsport Racing, the GT4 season now continues in the ADAC GT4 Germany. At the home race at the Nürburgring, the team will field three cars for the first time. Donar Munding and Leon Wassertheurer will contest the remaining three race weekends in the national GT4 championship for the team from Wiesemscheid. In addition, Mike David Ortmann and Hugo Sasse as well as Yevgen Sokolovskiy and Christopher Röhner will continue to compete in the Vantage GT4. Christopher Esser: “I’m looking forward to the first race with Leon and Donar: both have enough racing experience, although for Donar it’s the first GT 4 race, but here too I’m very confident, as the test drives have shown that the two are a force to be reckoned with.”
The two races will start at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday and 3:40 p.m. on Sunday. The 2022 ADAC GT4 Germany races can be watched free of charge on the high-reach platform sport.de and on adac.de/motorsport.
