Photo: Julien Delfosse/DPPI
TF Sport Corvette driver Charlie Eastwood believes the FIA World Endurance Championship LMGT3 package contains “a few outliers” that will be difficult for the team to beat for the rest of the season.
The Porsche team Manthey PureRxcing has demonstrated the class of the field in the first season of the LMGT3. The No. 92 car, shared by bronze-rated Alex Malykhin, Joel Sturm and Klaus Bachler, is comfortably in the championship with two class wins to its name.
The No. 81 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R, shared by Eastwood and co-drivers Rui Andrade and Tom van Rompuy, started the season on pole at the 1,812km race in Qatar, but has struggled to be competitive since then, achieving a best result of seventh.
The trio finished eighth at the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo last month, finishing two laps behind the winning Manthey PureRxcing car.
Eastwood admits that Malykhin’s tremendous speed as a Bronze driver, combined with Manthey’s operational strength and what he believes is a favourable balance of performance for the Porsche 911 GT3 R, makes the No. 92 virtually unbeatable.
“Ultimately, the bronze medals are where the biggest split is, and that has been the case every year, with the drivers of Ben Keating and Salih Yoluc (in previous seasons),” Eastwood told Sportscar365.
“But when you have a super-fast bronze medalist, two fast pros and the giant Manthey, it’s hard to compete with them.
“In terms of BoP, they were pretty strong, which makes it super difficult because the sister car (No. 91) is always up there with a slightly weaker lineup.
“There seem to be a few breakaways at the front of the field and we don’t seem to be very proactive in getting the field closer together.
“In the midfield, as we saw in Brazil with McLaren, BMW, Ferrari, Ford and ourselves, we were all within a few seconds.
“But there have been two outliers throughout the year, which makes it pretty difficult.”
The No. 81 Corvette’s race in Sao Paulo was marred early on by a collision between van Rompuy and the Manthey EMA Porsche of Yasser Shahin, leaving the car a lap down when Eastwood took over.
Later, even more time was lost when TF received a drive-through penalty for a yellow-light violation along the entire track, which Eastwood believes cost TF the chance of a first top-five finish.
“We had a chance to get through quite late in the race,” he said. “There was a three-car field in front of us, the McLaren (No. 59), the BMW (No. 46) and the Ferrari (No. 55), and we would have been just ahead of them all. We caught them by 15 to 6 seconds.”
“Without the penalty it would have been a top-five finish, which would be fantastic for us at the moment. We were just on the wrong side of the field. Just not to be.”
Seventh place at Imola remains the best result of the season so far for the No. 81 Corvette shared by Eastwood, Andrade and van Rompuy, while the No. 82 sister car of Daniel Juncadella, Sebastien Baud and Hiroshi Koizumi has never finished better than eighth.
However, Eastwood remains optimistic that a first headline result is possible at the next race at the Circuit of The Americas, Corvette’s home race.
“The Corvette is getting stronger with every event, we are getting to know the car better,” said the Irishman. “I’m increasingly hoping for a top result.”
“Even though we only finished 8th, I don’t think we were miles away from a top result. Next time we’ll be on home soil and hopefully we can put on a show for Corvette.”
