As revealed previously on DSC, Belgiums’s Team WRT is now a confirmed full season LMP2 entry for the 2021 FIA WEC which means, of course, that the team will contest the Le Mans 24 Hours for the first time too this year.
We’ll have a while to wait for full details of the programme, aside from confirmation that team will run an ORECA 07 Gibson and that the first-named driver is confirmed as Robin Frijns, the 29-year-old Dutchman has been part of the WRT family since 2015.
Today’s announcement marks an important milestone in Team WRT’s history, as the Belgian squad, which has enjoyed great success mostly in GT and Touring Car racing, enters LMP racing in what they themselves describe as a new long-term project.
So far, the only appearance of Team WRT in LMP racing was a successful one-off at the Spa round of the European Le Mans Series in 2016 (pictured top), finishing second after a late puncture ended a chance of victory.
It will be a new experience also for Robin Frijns, who has been successfully developing parallel careers in single-seater (with titles in single-seater including the FR 3.5 Series and race wins in GP2 and Formula E) and tin-tops, in GT3 and DTM.
His long-standing relationship with Team WRT has yielded Overall and Sprint Cup titles in the Blancpain GT Series, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. His teammates will be announced shortly.
Team Principal Vincent Vosse: “Since the very first day of the creation of Team WRT, sportscar racing and the Le Mans 24 Hours have been part of our dreams and future objectives. It couldn’t be otherwise for any true race lover.
“Until now, there hadn’t been an opportunity to be present with the level of ambitions and goal we always seek, but now, after eleven years, the time is right and we have an opportunity fitting our strategy.
“While we remain of course fully committed to our different GT engagements, with this LMP2 program, we embark on a new adventure, which we want to belong and as exciting and fruitful as the previous chapters in Team WRT’s history.
“We approach this new challenge with the greatest motivation and with a lot of humility. We are a reputed team and have endurance experience, but we definitely know this is a different challenge and a new playground, where we have a lot to learn and everything to prove.”
Robin Frijns: ”I really look forward to being reunited with Team WRT. We had great success in the past, being successful straight away. We won two Blancpain GT Series title, one Overall and one Sprint, and the goal now is to go for success straight away, as we did in GT3.
