SRO and the Royal Automobile Club of Belgium (RACB) are set to announce new and revised safety measures to come into action for this year’s Spa 24 Hours.
These will include:
A test for bronze and young silver categorised drivers;
A track familiarisation ‘walk’ and briefing to be carried out during race week;
The current test session for Bronze ranked drivers will be extended to all Silver ranked drivers and to any higher ranked drivers without experience of the track.
BMW Marc VDS Racing team boss Bas Leinders will join the SRO team and RACB stewards to evaluate these sessions with Jean Marc Gounon joining the roster of Race Control Officials.
The SRO and RACB partnership is also considering a new full course yellow procedure which could see cars being slowed to 80kph. ‘Black box’ recorders supplied by the FIA Institute are also set to be a mandatory feature of the GT3 cars.
The moves come after a troubled 2014 race which saw several serious accidents and injury to Ferrari driver Marcus Mahy. The British racer has since gone on to recover from serious head and neck injuries.
The new set of measures sit alongside those announced last October as part of the adoption by SRO of the Sean Edwards Foundation’s SET test.
The future of the Spa 24 Hours is also set to be bolstered further by announcements of the continued partnership between the RACB (Royal Automobile Club of Belgium) and SRO (Stephane Ratel Organisation) as DSC understands that an agreement has been reached for their collaboration to continue until 2018.
