MOTORSPORT: Supercars stars sign up for 12-Hour

Santa Claus was very good to the Bathurst 12-Hour.

A week before Christmas there were only four full-time Supercars drivers in the field for the GT enduro at Mt Panorama on February 4, but that number has since doubled.

The eight were all in the top 16 in last year’s Supercars championship – six of them in the top 10.

Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes are going back to The Mountain to defend the crown they won last year in a Ferrari 488 with one of the Italian stable’s contracted drivers, Finn Toni Vilander.

However, the long-time Triple Eight teammates won’t be together this time – Whincup will drive a Mercedes AMG GT3 and Lowndes a McLaren 650S GT3, with 2016 12-Hour winner and another T8 teammate, Shane Van Gisbergen, sharing that car with him.

The McLaren will be entered by YNA Autosport, supported by McElrea Racing, and today has come an announcement that Scott McLaughlin – who took Whincup to the wire for last year’s Supercars title – will be in another McLaren 650S for the same team at the 12-Hour.

While the Lowndes-Van Gisbergen car will be a fully-professional entry with French ace Come Ledogar, with whom ‘The Giz’ raced a McLaren in Europe’s Blancpain Endurance Series in 2016, the car McLaughlin will be in will be a pro-am entry.

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McLaughlin’s second outing in the 12-Hour, and first in Class A machinery, will come with a trio of co-drivers little known to the Australian racing public – Fraser Ross, Andrew Watson and Alexander West.

Ross competed for YNA in last year’s Australian GT season, Watson is a McLaren factory driver and West a Swede who has raced in the Blancpain series.

There is special significance in New Zealanders McLaughlin and Van Gisbergen racing McLarens as the marque was founded in the 1960s by their countryman Bruce McLaren, a Formula 1 driver who built cars for grand prix racing and North America’s famous but short-lived CanAm sports car series.

Van Gisbergen’s 2016 victory in the 12-Hour was in one of the twin-turbocharged 3.8-litre McLaren V8s.

Whincup will share a Scott Taylor Motorsport-run Merc with Frenchman Tristan Vautier and US-based Queenslander Kenny Habul.

The four full-time Supercars driver already named for the 12-Hour were Chaz Mostert, a winner of the 1000km and Six-Hour enduros at Bathurst, in a Schnitzer BMW M6; Cameron Waters, in another of the six Mercedes AMGs for British-based Strakka Racing; Tim Slade in another McLaren 650S entered by Objective Racing; and Lee Holdsworth in one of six Audi R8 LMSs from Audi Sport Customer Racing (apart from two from Audi Sport Team WRT in Europe).

Daytona 24-hour draws near
Roger Penske’s new Honda-engined sports cars in America, as well as Nissan’s new prototype and the revamped Mazdas have a lot of catching up to do on the dominant Cadillacs before the 24 Hours of Daytona on the last weekend of this month.

The four Cadillacs entered, with 5.5-litre V8s now rather than last year’s 6.2-litre versions that powered them to seven victories and championship success last year, filled the first four slots on the timesheets at the weekend’s ‘Roar before the 24’ – the three-day trial for the twice-around-the-clock Florida endurance classic.

Next best were the two Penske Acura ARX05s, with twin-turbocharged 3.5-litre V6 Honda engines fitted to cars based on the ORECA 07 chassis.

While Penske’s driver line-up includes three of his stars from IndyCar racing – Juan Pablo Montoya, Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud – as well as Graham Rahal, another IndyCar driver, and reigning North American sports car champion Ricky Taylor, it was the least known of his six pilots, Dane Cameron, who was the fastest of the six.

Fastest in the Cadillacs was Brazilian ex-F1 driver Felipe Nasr, a rookie to sports car competition but whose fastest lap was almost 1.2 seconds ahead of Cameron.

Another Brazilian with excellent sports car form, Pipo Derani, was seventh fastest in one of the Nissan Daytona Prototypes over the several sessions that included a ‘qualifying’ that determined the pit line-up for the January 28-28 race.

While there was talk of ‘sandbagging’ throughout the weekend, Nasr said he had “pushed 100 per cent”.

“Some cars are not showing fully what they can do, but I know we are,” he said.

The biggest struggler among the manufacturers was Mazda, which was almost 1.5 seconds off the Cadillac pace despite having withdrawn from racing in the middle of last season to revamp its RT24-Ps with Germany’s renowned Joest Racing, the most successful team in the history of Le Mans, and Canada’s Multimatic.

Spanish two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso was 12th in the field of 20 prototypes, although the United Autosports ORECA 07-Gibson he drove was an LMP2 car rather than a top-tier Daytona Prototype International.

One of Chip Ganassi’s Ford GTs topped the GTLM class, driven by Joey Hand, while ex-Sydneysider Ryan Briscoe was third in that class in the other Ganassi car. The Fords were split by a Chevrolet Corvette C7.R driven by Brit Oliver Gavin, with New Zealander Earl Bamber fourth in a Porsche 911 RSR.

Senior Ford executive Steven Armstrong attended the ‘Roar’ and was asked by dailysportscar.com’s Graham Goodwin where he wanted the Blue Oval to be, in motorsport terms, in 10 years.

“I want us to have a strong presence in motorsport with real relevance to the technology of our road cars,” Armstrong said.

“We’d actively encourage organisers to adopt as wide ranging a relevance as possible.

“Gone are the days when you can have a country-specific formula.”