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Prema, Cool Racing & Racing Team Turkey Win Race & Championship Doubles, Iron Dames Crush The Field In GTE

Proton take GTE Championship, Panis Racing,Kessel and Iron Lynx earn auto invitations to Le Mans alongside Prema, Cool and Proton

An extraordinary wet/dry season finale at Portimao saw a race of high quality to complete the 2023 European Le Mans Series.

Through an incident-filled four Hours the #9 Prema Racing Oreca of Juan Manuel Correa, Ferdinand Habsburg and Louis Deletraz emerged to take a dominant win, clinching the Championship ahead of second on the day, and in the points Panis Racing.

Job van Uitert soaked up late pressure to secure second place on the podium together with Nico Jamin and Julien Canal, the team also taking the second auto invitation to the 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours as a result.

That had looked in serious doubt with a run to the front from the #22 United Autosports effort, Duncan Tappy and Tom Gamble putting the car in a position to overhaul the Panis effort in the pits standings until Phil Hanson was caught out by worsening conditions in another shower, pitching the car off with the rear wheels into the gravel, the car retiring in the pits soon afterwards with clutch failure.

Completing the podium and chasing the #65 all the way home was the #37 Cool Racing car, Yifei Ye giving van Uitert no time to relax in second after Niklas Kruetten and Nico Lapierre had set up the grandstand finish.

LMP2 Pro-Am saw a second race and Championship win double, this time for the #34 Racing Team Turkey effort, Jack Aitken providing crushing pace to see off a threat from the #88 AF Corse effort after Salih Yoluc survived the worst of the early race conditions and Charlie Eastwood pushed hard to pull the effort through the LMP2 order.

Early trouble for Francois Perrodo in the wet saw Nicklas Nielsen and Alessio Rovera having to push hard, and they did, taking the fight to the #34 and the then leading #31 that had a very impressive start in the hands of Tijman van der Helm, leading overall, Mathias Beche added further pace with the team opting to save the Bronze time of Philipp Cimadomo to late in the race, but it was a mistake from Beche that cost the team dearly, a clash with the #13 Ligier (see below) putting the car into the gravel and costing them laps.

That would see the #32 drop behind the #24 Nielsen Racing effort who would come home third on the day, the top three in the race order mirroring the overall points result for the season, Ben Hanley coming home after an opening effort from Rodrigo Sales was ably backed up by good mid-race pace from Matt Bell.

LMP3 produced a simply unbelievable finish in the Championship.

Cool Racing needed a win for the #17, and for the #13 Inter Europol car to finish no better than seventh to clinch an unlikely title. Charles Crews took the #13 to the front and kept it there, catching and pulling away from initial race leader Mo Smith (who ran as high as seventh overall in the early laps!).

Smith though kept his head down and kept to the plan, a strategy followed on to a ‘T’ by Mikey Benham before the car was handed over to Malthe Jakobsen in fourth, trouble for the #10 Eurointernational car saw one contender out of the equation but after that, it was all about pace and the young Dane set about his task with aplomb.

It eventually came down to a duel between Jakobsen and his Sean Creech Motorsport IMSA team-mate Nico Pino in the #13, and for a while, it was nip and tuck before Jakobsen’s sustained pace finally told.

With the Polish-entered car passed over to Guillaume Oliviera the tactics changed, the #13 squad switching to a conservative strategy to secure the title, happy to cruise in third in the final hour.

But disaster would strike, in the form of the #31 TDS Oreca, a clash seeing the #13 turned around, this later likely leading to an as yet undiagnosed problem with a tyre or steering arm that saw the car lose pace dramatically, losing places galore and out of title contention.

A stop to change a wheel was too late, and as the car emerged from pitlane the Portuguese driver could not tune in at the first corner, ran wide and hit the #95 Aston Martin as he rejoined, both cars out on the spot and Oliviera entirely despondent.

The #17 would come through for the win, in what might be Jakobsen’s final LMP3 race, LMP2 beckons.

The #2 United Autosports trio of Bailey Violin, Josh Caygill and Finn Gehrsitz would come home a fighting second ahead of the second Cool racing Ligier, the #27 of Antoine Doquin, Jean-Ludovic Foubert and Nicolas Maulini.

Cool Racing thus will get the automatic invitation to Le Mans next year.

And so to GTE where the #77 Proton Competition Porsche of Christian Ried, Lorenzo Ferrari and Gianmaria Bruni would take the title, and the first of the trio of Le Mans auto-invitations that go to the class.

But that’s not the story of the race, neither was it a fine fighting second place from the #57 Kessel Ferrari of Takeshi Kimura, Frederic Schandorff and Mikkel Jensen who will also go to Le Mans next season.

Because the story was of an utterly dominant display by the #83 Iron Lynx Ferrari. The Iron Dames came of age today with an unusually crushing defeat of an as-usual, strong GTE field. The team stuck to their strategy as others threw the dice under an early race FCY.

Sarah Bovy, in likely her final race in Europe as a Bronze-ranked driver, was magnificent at the start of the race. Michelle Gatting finished the effort with a strong pace too. But Doriane Pin, just days after confirming herself as the 2022 Ferrari Challenge Europe Champion simply crushed the opposition, and she did it in truly trying circumstances, the Ferrari on new slicks as the rain started mid-race once again. The lap charts will tell the story, but by three-quarters distance, the #83 had lapped the field, and still went away, further, eventually building around a lap and a half of advantage.

An historic first ELMS win for the all-female team, a first in itself, but a further endorsement that the Iron Dames project is a light year away from tokenism. As an added bonus the #83 overhauled the sister #60 crew in the final points standings to confirm an auto invitation for Iron Lynx to Le Mans.

RACE RESULT >>

More later including a full race report from Mo Rehmann.

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