Lamborghini has been a stalwart of GT3 racing since the early days, first with the boxy Gallardo and for many years now the much-loved V10-engined Huracan. But a Raging Bull has never topped the podium at the crown jewel Spa 24 Hours event – an omission the marque’s factory drivers are determined to put right this weekend.
Sandy Mitchell has been with Lamborghini since 2021 and says he now feels like “part of the furniture”. His co-drivers for this GT World Challenge season aboard the #163 Vincenzo Sospiri Racing Huracan (featured) are the similarly long-tenured Marco Mapelli and Franck Perera.
Summing up their campaign so far, Mitchell said: “We’ve been quite fast, but strategy-wise not quite nailed it; we’ve been a bit unlucky with full-course yellows and things like that. I think we know we can be in the mix this weekend.”
Mitchell has two Spa 24 class wins to his name and is hoping his experience will translate to overall triumph this year.
“We’ve got two strong line-ups, driver and team-wise, with VSR and Grasser. Both cars have been quick all year, so we’re both thinking that if we beat the other one, we’ll probably have had a good race! We’re far from having the most cars in the Pro class, but the quality is good. Lamborghini has been searching for an overall win here for several years now, so to deliver that would be incredible.”
Managing traffic will, in Mitchell’s view, be key to the outcome of the race. “It’s really busy out there and with all the cars being of the same type, even if you’re fighting for the overall you’re still having to work to pass quick Silver drivers or a pro driver in a Bronze car. It’s not like a Hypercar driver at Le Mans flying past; you’re having to do a normal overtake every time. That’s what makes this race really tough.”
“It’s a little bit less about raw pace than, say, the Nurburgring, where with the lack of safety cars, you just have to be fast all the time. And equally, there isn’t the same wave-around rules as IMSA, where everyone’s going to be nose-to-tail in their class on every restart. So you need to stay up front to have fewer cars between you and the leader; you could be P10 towards the end but have 30 cars between you and the leader.”
With a hot race forecast, how does Mitchell think the Lamborghini will work in higher temperatures on the latest Pirellis? “We tend to go quite well in the night when temperatures come down, but we’re relatively kind on the tyres normally, so the conditions shouldn’t upset us too much. We’re pretty constant across varying conditions. It will be quite hot in the car for the drivers; there’s a good chance you’ll see us doing single stints during the day and doubling overnight.”
Over at Grasser Racing Team, continuity is the key for Jordan Pepper, as he hopes to fight for victory aboard the #63 Huracán (below) alongside Mirko Bortolotti and Luca Engstler.
For the first time since 2019 with Bentley Team M-Sport, Pepper is returning to the 24 Hours of Spa with the same team as the year prior, something the South African believes could be the key to finally getting Lamborghini on the 24 Hours of Spa podium.
“It’s a great benefit,” he tells DSC. “Especially considering we’re building off what was, if we look back at it, a really strong Spa 24 last year. It was Lamborghini’s best result, fifth, we were always pretty much in contention the whole week, the race didn’t go as planned, but for sure we had the speed.
“The way the team operates I know super-well now, I think GRT has become like a family to me. I feel like I fit in really well with everyone and especially Gottfried [Grasser], who’s a very hands-on team boss, he’s making a lot of key decisions and on the personal side we get along very well and obviously on the professional side we work in the same common way which is helping a lot.”
Since the Austrian outfit returned to GT World Challenge Europe’s Pro class at the beginning of 2024, its qualifying form has been impressive. This is something Pepper credits Grasser with. “Gottfried, I think he’s very well experienced for what to do with the car, but it’s not really the focus. The focus remains the same, we’ve really focused on building a strong race car over the one-hour distance.
“I think he leans a lot on his experience when it comes to knowing the car so well, to do the small changes that you don’t get time to test because you focus on doing the race car in terms of testing. From the driver’s side, we know what to expect and we can go out and extract the most.
“I think in endurance racing, especially GT World Challenge Endurance when you don’t really get opportunities to drive a lot on new tyres before qualifying, leaning on past experience is what makes the difference, and I think having a guy like Gottfried in the team the way he runs it is making the difference there.”
Following a difficult start to the Endurance Cup season plagued by misfortune, the #63 Lamborghini squad sits pointless after two rounds. With Spa offering the most points of the season, however, Pepper is yet to rule Grasser out of a title assault in the second half of the year.
“I think in GT World Challenge, you have two ways to go about it with winning this championship,” he says. “You either score good points at the races around Spa or you have a great Spa and I think that’s for us the goal. This goal is backed up by a successful Prologue test, which took place in similar conditions to what is forecast for this weekend.
“It’s going to be a warm weekend, very much similar conditions to what we experienced at the test. I think we ticked off a lot of boxes – we managed to run through a lot of race runs, try a lot of things and really what I felt was round off our package ready to race. Kind of stamped, approved and ready to race, and for me that’s valuable.
“Especially after a day like Thursday, when track time was limited, conditions were super mixed, we’re going to lean heavily on what we learned a couple of months ago.
“We took a step forward in terms of our race package from Paul Ricard to Monza. You can look at the last two races and think Spa is not looking great for us, but I look at it the other way around. We had a great Spa test, we showed great pace in Monza, at times great pace in Paul Ricard and Spa is a place historically we went super well so I’m fully confident heading into this race.
And what are Pepper’s aspirations for Sunday afternoon? “I think it’s time to finally put a Lamborghini at the top of the podium!”
Images courtesy of SRO
