Just three weeks after Pasin Lathouras and his teammates raced to a superb second place overall during the opening round of Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup 2017, held at Italy’s Autodromo Nazionale Monza, it’s off to another of the legendary classic high speed tracks, Silverstone Circuit in the UK, for Round 2 of the season.
At Monza Pasin enjoyed a very promising start to his second season in Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup in the #50 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GT3, which is sharing with Italian duo Michele Rugolo and Alessandro Pier Guidi. The 23-year-old Thai driver started the 3-hour race from pole position and the trio then raced to second place overall.
That also gave them a strong helping of points in the PRO class to put Pasin in second place in the provisional championship standings overall and it all sets them up nicely for Blancpain GT’s anticipated visit to Northamptonshire’s Silverstone Circuit.
The overriding challenge for this weekend will be to build on that robust start to the season and the target is clear, to achieve another podium finish. But it will be no easy feat with well over fifty GT3 car expected on track at Silverstone this weekend for the 3-hour race.
The action at Silverstone gets underway on Saturday (13 May) with the Free Practice and Pre Qualifying Sessions, both are 1-hour in duration. Then Sunday (14 May) will see the 1-hour Qualifying Session take place at 0945 (all local time, CET) before the race goes to green lights at 1455.
This is Pasin’s second season in Blancpain GT and his fourth racing in Europe. It’s also a second year that he is sharing this car with Michele and Alessandro so it’s a very settled and rounded driver line-up and clearly from Monza’s year opening performance it’s a combination that has the pace to go on and win. However, the Ferrari’s Balance of Performance (BoP) will come into play while Silverstone is a whole different prospect to Monza, although both are amongst the world’s fastest and most challenging racetracks. Rain is also forecast for the area during whole weekend. Last year during Blancpain GT’s Silverstone round Pasin finished P16 after starting P23; but the Ferrari was hit hard by its BoP rating for the event and was simply never a competitive proposition over that weekend.
Pasin is being supported during the 2017 Blancpain GT Endurance Series by NaRaYa, LaLaMa, NaRa by NaRaYa, Tourism Authority of Thailand and Sport Authority of Thailand.
Pasin Lathouras: “We had a great start to the year in Monza last month and we came out of a tough race with P2 so that was a really good way to get everything started. We hope to be able to carry that pace forward this weekend to Silverstone and clearly I would like to be on the podium again. We saw in Monza that with so many GT3 cars bunched up for the start it’s good to be on the front row if an incident unfolds so I hope we can be up there at the sharp end and get a good start to the race and hopefully get stuck in, keep out of trouble and push for more points.”
