“Frustrated” Kirchhoefer Had “No Warning” of Car Woes

Garage 59 McLaren driver Marvin Kirchhoefer said “there was not a single warning” of the suspected electrical problem that cost him LMGT3 victory in the FIA World Endurance Championship at Imola on both his and the team’s series debuts.

The No. 10 McLaren 720S GT3 Evo had qualified on pole thanks to Tom Fleming and, although Antares Au briefly dropped behind the No. 69 Team WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO, it was not long before Kirchhoefer was back in front.

He enjoyed a narrow lead heading into final 35 minutes of the six-hour race, when the McLaren suddenly ground to a halt and he had to limp back to the pits.

“We just suddenly lost drive, lost power, lost pretty much everything on the car,” Kirchhoefer told Sportscar365 of the problem.

“We could bring it back to the garage and they tried something which seemed to fix the issue but we’re not quite sure yet what actually happened.”

Despite the positives from such a strong debut, Kirchhoefer was left angry that the team could not seal the deal and complete the impressive win.

“Leading laps is nice and I did enjoy the moment and I did enjoy my first stint after Antares,” he said.

“The car looked really strong all weekend but I’m not going away ‘at least we led a few laps’, I’m very frustrated and disappointed obviously with not finishing where we started and where we were on the way to.

“If you have half an hour to go and there was not a single warning that something like that could happen, you’re already thinking about we could really do well and have a great debut and unfortunately we didn’t.”

Kirchhoefer, who has been a stalwart of the Garage 59 squad for the past six years, praised the “outstanding job” from the team all weekend.

“It was very well executed – especially if you put into respect this was our first WEC race,” he added.

“Pretty much every pitstop we have done was faultless, it was always very strong by every single mechanic, on the engineering side everything was going in the right direction and hopes were very high to make our debut a very impressive one. With just over half an hour to go, we couldn’t quite finish it off.”

The McLaren ultimately returned to the track in the final minutes but was classified 15 laps down from the leaders.

With Garage 59’s woe, it opened the door for the No. 69 BMW of Dan Harper, Anthony McIntosh and Parker Thompson to triumph, but they had a nervy finish of their own with Harper only crossing the line 0.265 seconds ahead of the No. 33 TF Sport Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R.

“At the end, there was a bit of a miscommunication and it was quite tricky for the team to judge if the Hypercar leaders were going to overtake us again, so I didn’t know if there was going to be two laps or three laps to go,” explained Harper, who like Thompson was making his series debut.

“We were already quite tight on fuel to the end and then I was told two laps to go, so I came onto the last corner and was doing a bit of celebrating thinking that was it over and then they were like, ‘Ah, this is the start of your final lap.’

“At that point, Nicky was quite close and then it was a bit sweaty for the last lap but I got the job done.”