The South of France wasn’t worth the visit for ROWE RACING this year. After fourth place last year, the team from St. Ingbert was haunted by bad luck at the atmospheric 6-hour race in Le Castellet in the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup in 2016. Both of the team’s BMW M6 GT3 had their hopes of points dashed in the early stages with collisions.
In summery temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius, any chance of points at the ex-Formula 1 venue for ROWE RACING #99 was lost shortly after the start, as Philipp Eng was caught in an incident in the middle of the 57-car field.
The car was so badly damaged that Eng had to return the #99 to the pit after just twelve laps. The Austrian was scheduled to be joined by his regular Blancpain GT teammate, Briton Alexander Sims, as well as Stef Dusseldorp from the Netherlands, but neither would feature after the accident. In the drivers’ standings of the Blancpain GT Series, Sims and Eng are now in eighth place with 33 points.
The BMW M6 GT3 #99 was soon joined in the pits by sister car, the #98. The second ROWE RACING car, for which BMW Motorsport assigned the three German works drivers Dirk Werner, Lucas Luhr and Jens Klingmann, was also involved in a coming together. Starting driver Dirk Werner was forced to return to the pit for an unplanned safety stop, because parts of the car had come loose. Since this stop took some time, the team decided to use the rest of the race as an extended test session, exploring tuning and set up. Thus, the team gained valuable insights with the #98 for the 24-hour race in Spa on 30th/31st July. The #98 car completed a total of 61 laps, 104 fewer than the winners.
Before the second 24-hour classic of the year in Spa, ROWE RACING will be in action again this weekend. The Blancpain GT Series will make its first of two visits to the Nürburgring, with a round of the Sprint Cup held on the 3rd July as part of the atmospheric Truck Grand Prix.
ROWE RACING team principal Hans-Peter Naundorf: “We had something totally different in mind, and wanted to prepare for Spa properly, but then misfortune thwarted our plans. It started in qualifying and continued in the race, where both of our cars were involved in collisions in the middle of the field during the start. In the case of #99, the damage to the chassis and the effects on the aerodynamics were too great to continue the race. It would have taken hours to repair. The collision also caused parts of the #98′s chassis to come away, meaning that we had to make a safety stop. Since this took some time, we decided to test various set-ups to get to know the BMW M6 GT3 even better.”