Team LNT Ginettas Drop off COTA Entry List

The two Team LNT Ginetta G60-LT-P1 AERs have been withdrawn from this month’s FIA World Endurance Championship race at Circuit of The Americas.

The latest version of the entry list for the Lone Star Le Mans event shows only the two Toyota TS050 Hybrids and Rebellion Racing’s R13 Gibson in the LMP1 class.

A statement from Ginetta explained that the replacement of the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo with Lone Star Le Mans created operational difficulties for the LNT team.

“The No. 5 and No. 6 G60-LT-P1 cars needed significant planned maintenance after Bahrain [in December],” read the statement.

“The WEC calendar is challenging, especially for any team with a new car in its first season and we have not had the chassis back at the factory since before Silverstone in August.

“The cancellation of the earlier WEC race in Brazil and the new race at COTA made it impossible to do the planned work at our facility in Virginia, so the cars were shipped post-race back to Ginetta in the UK. The cars will hopefully arrive at the factory [on Tuesday].”

The LNT squad, which is effectively the Ginetta works team, entered the G60-LT-P1 prototypes in each of the first four WEC races of the 2019-20 season.

Its best finish to date was a third-place result for Ben Hanley, Egor Orudzhev and Charlie Robertson in the season-opening 4 Hours of Silverstone.

The provisional version of the COTA entry list showed both Ginettas with the same driver lineups that Team LNT ran in the previous round at Bahrain International Circuit.

Hanley and Robertson were set to share the No. 5 machine with Jordan King while Chris Dyson, Mike Simpson and Guy Smith were slated to pilot the No. 6.

These two lineups are on the list for the 1000 Miles of Sebring in March.

The updated COTA entry also includes a new Oreca LMP2 effort from DragonSpeed with no drivers nominated at the moment.

DragonSpeed team principal Elton Julian told Sportscar365 last month that the team initially filed an entry for COTA but was denied because of a lack of garage space.

That was when the field was at 31 cars, but the two Ginettas dropping off appears to have balanced out the total entry count at 29, enabling DragonSpeed to join.

Story updated on Tuesday morning following Ginetta’s statement.