Winward Targeting Race Wins in Remaining Endurance Rounds

Winward Racing team principal Russell Ward hopes his team can put on a “really strong showing” in the remaining three Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS Endurance Cup rounds after setbacks at Paul Ricard and Spa left it out of championship contention.

Lucas Auer, Maro Engel and Daniel Morad failed to score points in the season-opening three-hour contest at Paul Ricard and retired from the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, resulting in a pointless tally with the Nürburgring, Monza and Jeddah rounds remaining.

This was despite a promising early showing at Spa, where Auer placed second in Superpole and led an early portion of the race before a puncture fired the starting gun on a series of setbacks that eventually led to overnight retirement.

Speaking to Sportscar365, team principal Ward admitted that the No. 48 Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo is “really out of the championship fight,” but added that Winward remains motivated to hunt for strong results in the three races still to come.

“We’ve done quite a bit of of SRO racing in Europe, but this is our first full Pro attempt and and with that comes an incredible responsibility to AMG,” Ward said.

“We really want to show ourselves to be the best at all possible times. Although we’re really out of the championship fight, and some of that is bad luck and some of that is mistakes on our part, there’s still [three] races left.

“We want to have a really, really strong showing. We’re going to put the maximum effort in there to be the best and I think that we have some left and it’ll be interesting to see if we can pick it up a little.”

When asked if race wins are the team’s target for the three races left on the Endurance Cup schedule, Ward replied: “Exactly.”

The setbacks in the longer races have been something of an outlier for Winward in an otherwise fruitful European campaign for Engel and Auer.

The Austro-German trio sit just two points behind Charles Weerts and Dries Vanthoor in the Sprint Cup, while in DTM Engel has moved into fourth in the drivers’ standings thanks to podiums at Oschersleben, the Lausitzring and the Norisring.

Ward maintains that Winward’s European campaign, in which it also leads the Silver Cup standings with Colin Caresani, Daan Arrow and Tanart Sathienthirakul, has thus far ‘exceeded exceptations’ overall.

“Honestly, in SRO I think they’ve been performing incredibly well,” said Ward.

“At Spa, we had such an incredible machine. The drivers loved it and luck really didn’t go our way. The puncture set us back quite badly.

“In the DTM, we’re still in the hunt for the championship. Maro and Lucas are doing an amazing job and I think they’re getting as much out of the car as we can.

“In DTM, it seems like we’re maybe a little bit behind the HRT car in qualifying pace, but in race pace, we match them or are quicker.

“There’s always work to do and I don’t think we’re ever 100% happy with the performance, even when we win.

“That’s just the type of team that we are. The competition here is incredibly high and you’re competing against some great competitors and and so we’re constantly looking for things to improve.

“You’re talking about hundreds of a second here, tenths of a second [there], and in order successful at this level, you really just have to constantly be improving.”