Last weekend Mark Poole’s Aston Martin Vantage GT3 was back in action, contesting its first 24 Hour race around the Barcelona Grand Prix track. No stone had been left unturned in our preparation and build up for this event, and joining Mark and regular driving partner Richard Abra aboard the Vantage were none other AMR factory pilots, Stefan Mücke and Bruno Senna.
From the point that we started the pre-event testing on Wednesday, through Thursday’s test, Friday practice and official qualifying, and then during the first 50 minutes of the race, everything could not have gone better. The car had ran faultlessly and was extremely fast, the Barwell crew had their race strategy and pit stop practice absolutely nailed, all the drivers had got plenty of mileage in the car and were quick. Stefan then secured pole position, made a perfect start to the race and was pulling away from the rest of the pack at such a rate that he would have been nearly a whole lap ahead after the first hour mark....
...But then ‘Lady Luck’ simply deserted us. Just after 50 minutes the car suffered the extremely unusual issue of a left rear wheel retention failure and the wheel became detached, leaving Stefan stranded at the side of the track. There were no other issues with the car but unfortunately it somehow took the marshals 45 minutes to recover the car back to our pits garage, where the crew took just five minutes to send it back out again. However by this stage we were 17 laps behind the race-leading Porsche, having dropped from first to 52nd place overall, and it was a case of pushing on to recover the lost ground! Up until just before the nine hour mark, this plan was working well and such was our pace that we had clawed our way back up to fifth place overall and gained four laps on the leader and 10 laps on the second-placed Mercedes!
So just when we were getting ourselves right back in the game and knuckling down to make even bigger inroads on the leaders during the night...a wheel weight ejected from another car was lying on the circuit and got flicked up into the front of the MP Motorsport-backed Aston, went through the protective mesh and put a big hole in the radiator. To replace the radiator (which is fully embedded) is a major job and cost us another hour of precious track time. With the leading Porsche and second Mercedes suffering no problems during the first half of the race, the result was that at the 12-hour mark we were back down to 27th overall, 41 laps behind the leader and 33 laps down on the Merc. We pressed on with our second fightback with the same vigour, but were hindered again in our night-time quest when we suffered an identical left rear wheel retention failure. On this occasion we got the car back to the pits, but the failure had caused more mechanical damage than before, and more vital laps were lost in the garage.
Then in the 17th hour disaster struck as Stefan was tagged in the left rear corner by a backmarker as he drove past it on the pits straight at 140mph. He was then a passenger as the car was turned sharp left and hit the retaining wall at only slightly unabated speed. The car was severely damaged in the incident, and Stefan unfortunately sustained some injuries which (although not serious) put him in hospital for a few days afterwards.
It was a terrible and extremely unjust way for such a great performance by all the drivers and team to have ended, although all of us can take heart from the fact that we had been fully on course to secure a top result but ultimately we were thwarted by forces outside of our control.
Barwell Motorsport / MP Motorsport
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