Blancpain Barcelona Resources

» The 63 GRT Grasser Lamborghini took both the overall Blancpain GT Series Championship and the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup Honours. Whilst the overall Championship looked comfortable, the Endurance Cup was always going to be more difficult, with GRT trailing Bentley by 16 points before the race.

» The GRT Grasser crew were not prepared to sit and wait for the title to come to them. After a difficult opening stint, Andrea Caldarelli took the wheel and dragged the Lamborghini up to third, including an amazing pass on the #4 and #84 Mercedes into the hairpin.

» Bentley struggled throughout the weekend with both cars. Bentleys title hopes were pinned on the #8, but the car struggled to break the top 10. After a titanic scrap with the 99 ROWE Racing BMW and 114 Jaguar, the #8 Bentley cried enough and slowed to a halt in the pit lane. The failure ends the career of the current generation Bentley Continental GT3.

» The #7 Bentley suffered a major accident in qualifying. With the qualifying session being run on race-day morning, it only left 3 hours for M-Sport to rebuild the car. Superb work from the M-Sport mechanics got the car ready for the race, and the #7 Bentley went on to finish 19th.

» The race was incident filled from the start. The #59 McLaren ran into the back of the #98 BMW before the green, causing significant damage to the McLaren. Half a lap later, Victor Shytar missed his braking point and made heavy contact with the #19 Lamborghini.

» To make these incidents worse, the marshals recovery pick-up trucks were unable to transverse the gravel and beached themselves. Eventually race director Alain Adam threw a Full Course Yellow to recover the marshal vehicles.

» In an effort to keep the race flowing, Alain Adam used some short notice FCY calls to recover debris. The implementation involved going to yellow with 10 seconds notice, and then back to green around 10 seconds later. The amateur drivers struggled with the sudden quick transitions, and were often left standing at FCY speed, whilst the professional drivers quickly got back to speed.

» Barcelona traditionally held Blancpain Sprint Cup races. 2017 was the first time the race was the Endurance Cup format, having swapped with the Nurburgring which became a Sprint Cup round. Barcelona maintains the Endurance Cup round for 2018.

» The Barcelona race marks the final races for the current generation Bentley Continental GT3 and Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3 cars. RJN have been testing the 2018 Nissan, whilst M-Sport are developing the new Bentley. New cars are rumoured from McLaren, and perhaps Emil Frey.

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