Eastwood: TF Sport Struggling to Match LMGT3 “Outliers”

TF Sport Corvette driver Charlie Eastwood believes that the FIA World Endurance Championship’s LMGT3 pack contains “a couple of outliers” that will be difficult for the team to beat for the remainder of the season.

Porsche team Manthey PureRxcing has proven the class of the field in LMGT3’s first season, with the No. 92 car shared by Bronze-rated Alex Malykhin, Joel Sturm and Klaus Bachler holding a comfortable championship lead with two class wins to their name.

The No. 81 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R shared by Eastwood and his co-drivers Rui Andrade and Tom van Rompuy kicked off the season with pole in the Qatar 1812km, but since then has struggled for competitiveness, scoring a best finish of seventh.

The trio finished eighth in last month’s 6 Hours of Sao Paulo, and were classified two laps behind the winning Manthey PureRxcing car.

Eastwood admits that Malykhin’s sheer speed as a Bronze driver, combined with Manthey’s operational strength and what he sees as a favorable Balance of Performance for the Porsche 911 GT3 R, is making the No. 92 virtually unbeatable.

“Ultimately the Bronzes are the most split and it has been every year, with your Ben Keating’s and your Salih Yoluc’s [in past seasons],” Eastwood told Sportscar365.

“But when you have a super-fast Bronze, two fast pros and the giant that is Manthey, it is hard to compete with them.

“On the BoP side, they’ve been quite strong, which makes it super difficult because the sister [No. 91] car with a somewhat lesser lineup is always up there too.

“There just seems to be a couple of outliers at the top of the pack and it just seems that we’re not very proactive in making the pack closer.

“The middle of the pack, 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 all year, which makes it pretty tough.”

The No. 81 Corvette’s race in Sao Paulo was compromised early on by contact between van Rompuy and the Manthey EMA Porsche of Yasser Shahin, which left the car a lap down by the time Eastwood took over the car.

Further time was lost late on with a drive-through penalty for a full-course yellow infraction, which Eastwood feels cost TF the chance of a first top-five finish.

“We had a drive-through pretty late in the race,” he said. “There was a pack of three in front of us, the [No. 59] McLaren, the [No. 46] BMW and the [No. 55] Ferrari, and we would have been just in front of all them. We caught them up from 15 to six seconds.

“Without the penalty it would have been a top-five, which for us at the moment would be fantastic. We were just on the wrong side of that pack. 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, with the sister No. 82 car of Daniel Juncadella, Sebastien Baud and Hiroshi Koizumi yet to finish higher than eighth.

But Eastwood remains optimistic that a first headline result could be on the cards next time out at the Circuit of The Americas, which marks Corvette’s home race.

“The Corvette is getting stronger every event, we’re getting to get to know the car better,” said the Irishman. “I am getting more and more hopeful of a big result.

“Even though we were only P8, I don’t think we were a million miles away from a big result. Next time we’re on home soil, so hopefully we can put on a show for Corvette.”