Young British GT3 racing hopeful Alessandro Latif faced some of the toughest conditions he’s ever raced in at the Slovakian round of the Blancpain Sprint Series, where a huge first-corner crash and a mid-race deluge brought out the red flags twice in the Saturday qualifying race.
Latif and co-driver Marc Basseng managed to keep their Phoenix Racing Audi of trouble, however, finishing eighth overall in the disjointed race and bagging another Pro-Am class victory. The Sunday championship encounter saw the duo go one better and finish seventh – their best result of the season so far.
Latif holds himself to a high standard, though, and while this was his and Basseng’s best performance of the year so far on paper, he still felt more could have been achieved. “It was good but at the same time it wasn’t,” he told DSC. “We had better luck than we’ve had at a lot of the previous rounds, apart from at the start. But I think I underperformed a bit in Sunday’s main race. I think I felt the pressure a bit too much running in the top five. A top-five finish was there for the taking, but I messed it up a little bit so we finished seventh overall. The conditions on Saturday were pretty dreadful, too – I was shocked that the race continued for as long as it did.”
Latif’s next stop on the Sprint Series tour was the Autodromo do Algarve in Portimao, Portugal. Like Zandvoort earlier in the season, he had the benefit of having tested in advance of the race. Talking through his Portuguese weekend, Latif said: “Practice wasn’t great, as we were on old sets of tyres, but then Marc was fastest overall in the frist part of qualifying, so that was a good sign. My new-tyre run in Q2 went well, and we got it in to Q3, where Marc was able to qualify ninth on the grid.
“I started the qualifying race on Saturday afternoon, and got caught out on the inside at the start. Then at turn 14 early in the race [Giorgio] Pantano just decided not to brake and ran in to me – that really spoiled our race. We were lucky when the safety car was deployed for another incident, as that allowed us to catch back up to the field, putting us 11th, which was an okay spot to start the Sunday championship race.”
Basseng made good progress from that position the following day, handing the R8 over to Latif in fourth place overall. But with some of the world’s fastest and most experienced GT drivers stacked up behind him in the form of Stephane Ortelli, Tomas Enge, Markus Winkelhock and Rene Rast, Latif concluded discretion was the better part of valour and didn’t risk a race-ending accident by battling too hard.
He instead brought the car home safely in eighth overall, ensuring another Pro-Am victory, which took him and Basseng to a 27-point lead in the category standings with two Sprint Series events remaining. And there was more good news after the race, when a penalty for one of the WRT Audis saw Basseng and Latif elevated to seventh.
Zolder in Belgium and a street race in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku are next up on the Blancpain series calendar, but before that Latif is broadening his horizons with a foray into historic racing at Spa-Francorchamps over the weekend of 19-21 September. He’ll be sharing a 1955 Jaguar with Harry Wyndham in the Spa Six Hours, bidding for honours in the Royal Automobile Club’s Woodcote Trophy.
“I’m very excited about this new challenge and the different form of racing,” said Latif. “I think it’ll be good to go into this race weekend and not have the pressure I’m usually under in the Blancpain series. The Jaguar was beautiful to drive when I tested it at Silverstone recently. It was hugely successful at Le Mans and was a car way ahead of its time.”
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