On its second race-weekend in the GT4 European Series the german RN Vision STS racing team leaves Great Britain with one top-five result and two further results in the top-12 of a 31 car-strong GT4 field. Again Pavel Lefterov and John-Louis Jasper missed the podium by just one position, and were the best Cayman-pilots in heat one. This result was even more remarkable as the characteristic of the british track was not fitting the Caymans in the field on this weekend.
After two difficult qualifying session on Saturday afternoon, John-Louis Jasper in the #112 Porsche Cayman GT4 MR started the first of two 60 minute races from position 15; his team-mate Razvan Umbrarescu in the #111 sister car found himself all the way down in 25th position on the grid for the Sunday morning race. Both drivers managed to improve on their starting positions in the early stages of race 1, with Jasper advancing at one point as far as 8th place before handing over his car in 10th position to co-driver Pavel Lefterov. When the pit-stop-window closed with 25 minutes to go, Lefterov had managed to climb up all the way to fifth place, which he would go on to defend until the end of the race. A post race penalty for the 3rd placed competitor then moved Lefterov and Jasper up to fourth position overall – just 5 seconds behind P3. Hendrik Still, who had taken over the #111 from Umbrarescu also gained a number of positions and finished the first race of the day just outside the top-10 in position 12.
In the afternoon race, which – just like race 1 – was marred by a total of three safety car interventions, the two RN Vision STS Cayman GT4s started from positions 12 for the #112 and 15 for the #111. Again both cars had a good start, running nose to tail in 10th and 11th position, before Hendrik Still’s #111 car was handed a drive through penalty by the stewards for avoidable contact, which dropped him down to 23rd place in the running order. Lefterov in the #112 car managed to defend 10th position until handing over to Jasper, while Still and later his co-driver Umbrarescu mounted an impressive comeback drive, which saw them back in 14th position at the end of the pitstop window. After a final post-safety car restart with 8 minutes to go, Jasper in the #112 was pushed into the barriers by a McLaren, while Umbrarescu went on to score another 12th place finish in a race which was ultimately red-flagged with three minutes to go and not restarted. “Considering, we were almost at the end of the field after the penalty, the final P12-result was very good. We had very good fights during the race. Who knows where we might have ended up without the penalty…” concluded Romainian Umbrarescu after the race.
The next round of the GT4 European series northern cup will take place on the 10-11 June at the Red Bull Ring in Austria.
