The Shannons Australian GT Sprint Championship’s round supporting the Formula One World Championship opener at the Albert Part circuit for its second round is underway, with Ash Walsh in the #44 Supabarn Supermarkets Audi R8 LMS taking the win in race one.
It was a tight fight through the 25-minute race with Ash Walsh (Audi), Kelvin van der Linde (Audi) and David Russell (Lamborghini) all racing nose to tail in the opening portion of the race.
The trio were rarely separated by more than 1.5 seconds throughout the first two-thirds of the race. van der Linde led the first portion of the race by Walsh was able to make a pass on track and once he hit the lead, the pace of the race increased.
This ensured that the two leading Audis were able to create a small gap on the Lamborghini, that they were able to hold to the end.
The format changed for this weekend with four 25 minute races taking place over the weekend. There is a single driver to take the grid over the weekend with no pitstops. To make up for the pitstop parity, the faster drivers will compete against each other in races one and three and the lower ranked drivers in races two and four.
The quick drivers were quite well behaved with only one or two incidents. The major one was Ivan Capelli (Lamborghini) coming into contact with an Audi, damaging the front of his car. He was able to limp back to the pits and repair the car but the race for win was over.
There however was a major incident involving the #3 Audi of Ash Samadi who crashed heavily to the inside wall on the front straight. At the time of writing it was not clear what happened to the Audi to create this dramatic moment.
The Audi’s front end was heavily damaged and the team will have a lot of work to do if that car is to see further action.
A couple of other cars had minor off track excursions but the race remained green throughout.
There was also relief for the Steven Richards BMW having had major mechanical and electrical dramas at Adelaide. The team seemed to have gotten to the bottom of the issues with the BMW but could not fight off Lewis Williamson’s McLaren in the fight for seventh.
In the other class – the invitational class, Benny Simonsen in the Hector Lester entered Ferrari won, taking 10th overall.
Race two gets underway at 10:45am Friday local time.
