The Blancpain GT Endurance Cup 2016 moved onto Silverstone Circuit in the UK last weekend and for Pasin Lathouras is was back to race action in the #50 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GT3 after a short three week break since the opening round at Monza last month.

Pasin and his team mates, Italians Michele Rugolo and Alessandro Pier Guidi, enjoyed a much better weekend in terms of reliability than that had in Italy and were satisfied to turn in a relatively trouble free race, with just a few niggles, to take the checkered flag as the early Sunday evening light was beginning to fade over Northamptonshire.

However with the organisers re-rating the Ferrari’s BoP [Balance of Performance] since the opening round at Monza the Italian racecar simply wasn’t able to get onto level terms with other front running cars and that would call for a different strategy and see the crew in the yellow #50 car fighting up the order after a qualifying session that was also compromised by traffic.

Pasin enjoyed a very good race and with Alessandro starting the car, the young Thai taking the middle stint and Michele wrapping the race up, the trio dug in and made a big effort to steadily chip away positions from their P23 starting slot, which was around mid point of the massive grid of 53 GT3 cars that turned up at Silverstone, a field that as usual was packed out with the world’s top racing stars and factory supported teams.

In fact the #50 car was never outside of the top two Ferrari 488 GT3s running on track all race.

For Pasin this is very much a learning year, he’s graduated to the toughest series in the world exclusively reserved for GT3 cars. It’s also a development year for the brand new Ferrari 488 GT3 so the challenge for Pasin is to improve his performances race by race. The 22-year-old Thai driver certainly ticked off all those boxes at Silverstone with highly consistent and steadily improving lap times all weekend. He put in a very strong and consistent middle stint as all three drivers worked hard to keep moving up the running order to eventually finish in P16.

Pasin, who is being supported by NaRaYa, LaLaMa, NaRa by NaRaYa, Tourism Authority of Thailand and Sport Authority of Thailand this year, can take a lot of strong positives away from the weekend as he looks towards the next race of the year.

Attention now turns to the next round of Blancpain GT Endurance Cup 2016, which will take place at Paul Ricard Circuit in a little over a month’s time (24-25 June). Pasin has raced on the French circuit several times before so he will face a track that he knows relatively well now.

Pasin Lathouras: “Overall I’m satisfied with the weekend, we weren’t able to get on a level with the other cars with the BoP and had a few niggles and some traffic in qualifying but I’m happy with my performance and it’s good to get to the checkered flag in such a massive field in a strong position and we now look forward to Paul Ricard next month and taking that solid base of last weekend forward and getting a good result.”