At the historic Italian venue, the young Audi Sport Italia guns may not have succeeded in impersonating miracle workers across two successive GT3 rounds. However, their stunning Saturday comeback win on wet and today fifth place on a glorious Sunday afternoon was an effort good enough to keep Bar Baruch alive as an Italian champ hopeful and send Mattia Drudi back to his usual Mobil 1 Porsche Supercup chores happy to have posted his maiden GT3 win.
The Karmiel, Israel-based driver will return to the deciding rounds at the Mugello finale nourishing his 132 points haul. After claiming at Monza his third 2018 win (in the previous ones he was alongside Audi stars Marcel Fässler and Jamie Green), Baruch is poised to make his best to spoil the showdown between Lamborghini’s leading duo (and Monza Sunday winners) Giacomo Altoé, Daniel Zampieri and Ferrari’s former champ Stefano Gai. They boast respectively 143 and 138 points, therefore Baruch will play an underdog role.
An underdog role that he and Drudi starred in on Saturday, as drizzle early on and then rain fell over the Villa Reale park. Starting from row four Baruch had an excellent stint, moving up from P7 to runnerup behind Gai’s Ferrari. As the track deceptively looked on the verge of drying up, Audi Sport Italia and most teams opted to swap rain tyres for slicks. All the drivers taking the wheel in the second half of the race soon found out that it had been an optimistic move. As it is no one proved more versed for low-grip skills than Drudi: in spite of being one of the youngest on track, the Rimini-born driver tamed the slippery track and the opposition, posting a deserved and nail-biting victory in his third race sitting in a GT3 Audi.
Saturday heroics however today did not help Drudi to make the gap from the leading Ferraris and Lamborghinis: he had to call himself happy to recover a couple of spots, moving up from P7 to P5. On top of that his Israeli team mate also had to cope with the 15-second handicap-time prize that comes attached to every Italian GT win, and he deemed himself lucky to stay in P5 as he resumed the race, trying to close the gap from Gai’s Ferrari and fending off the challenge from the following 488 driven by Daniel Mancinelli and Andrea Fontana.
