Proton Competition has called up 24-year-old Dutch driver Bent Viscaal to drive the team’s #5 Mustang Sampling Porsche 963 at this weekend’s Motul Course de Monterey at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
Viscaal will be the sixth different driver to share the cockpit with co-driver Gianmaria Bruni this IMSA season, following Neel Jani, Alessio Picariello, Romain Dumas, Julien Andlauer, and most recently Mike Rockenfeller – who appeared at Long Beach but will resume his commitments to Ford Multimatic Motorsport this weekend.
He is just days removed from finishing second at the ELMS 4 Hours of Le Castellet with Proton Competition, in his third season of LMP2 racing across ELMS and the FIA World Endurance Championship. It was Viscaal’s second ELMS podium – his first came at the same event in 2022 with Algarve Pro Racing. In 2023 he finished all seven WEC rounds in the top ten driving the #9 Prema Racing ORECA 07-Gibson.
Before his move to sports cars, Viscaal raced in single-seaters – he was the 2018 Euroformula Open Championship runner-up, a race winner in the FIA Formula 3 Championship and scored multiple podiums in Formula 2.
His co-driver Bruni has scored two top-five finishes this season in IMSA, fifth at Daytona and Long Beach, to put Mustang Sampling Proton Competition eighth in the GTP Teams’ Championship standings.
Jani and Andlauer will drive Proton’s #99 Porsche 963 in this weekend’s 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, without Harry Tincknell, who will honour his Ford commitments at Laguna Seca. Picariello is racing in GT World Challenge Asia this weekend at Chang International Circuit.
Feature image © Sergey Savrasov Photography
