With a front-row starting position in race one and two top-five results, the opening weekend of the Northern Cup of the GT4 European Series was an unexpected success for the german RN Vision STS Racing Team.
The series newcomers managed to qualify both of the team’s Porsche Cayman GT4 MR in the top-ten of the 33-car-strong GT4-field in the first of Saturday’s two qualifying sessions: Gabriele Piana put the car he would share with Razvan Umbrarescu seventh on the grid, while Pavel Lefterov set the second-best time and consequently started the Saturday night race from the first row of the field. An even faster time, which would have resulted in the pole, was eventually deleted by the officials.
During race 1, Pavel Lefterov profited from a spin by the pole-setting McLaren of Duncan Huisman and took the lead of the race in the first lap. After some back-and-forth with the Aston-Martin of Matt Nicoll-Jones, Lefterov was still in the lead when he handed the #112 Porsche Cayman over to his team mate John-Louis Jasper. Jasper was on his way to a podium finish when the stewards of the race issued the team with a 40-second penalty for not adhering to the track limits in the closing stages of the race, dropping Jasper and Lefterov down to 13th position overall. In the meantime, the sister car of Gabriele Piana and Razvan Umbrarescu had a steady race and improved to 5th place overall – securing the RN Vision STS team’s first top-five result in a GT4 event.
For the Sunday race, John-Louis Jasper had qualified in 14th position overall, while Razvan Umbrarescu had scored the 18th best time in a qualifying session marred by other cars’ accidents and subsequent red flag periods. This time it was the duo of Lefterov and Jasper that finished the race inside the top-five, profiting from a strong opening stint by Jasper, who handed the #112 Cayman over to Lefterov up five positions from his starting slot, and a series of accidents by cars at the front of the field. At the end of the 60-minute race, Lefterov, who fought on the last lap for P3, missed the podium by a mere two-tenths of a second, while the #111 Cayman of Gabriele Piana and Razvan Umbrarescu came home in 14th position.
