Sportscar365’s Team of the Year

Sportscar365 is recognizing the top competitors and moments from the 2022 season. Next up is the Team of the Year award, as selected by website staff.

Team of the Year – Akkodis ASP

It had been a long time coming. Auto Sport Promotion, the French team spearheaded by former driver Jerome Policand, tried for years to win the biggest prize in SRO Motorsports Group racing but fell short — sometimes agonizingly so — on every occasion.

That was until Raffaele Marciello, Daniel Juncadella and Jules Gounon drove the No. 88 Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo to victory in this year’s TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa.

Policand’s team, which rebranded from AKKA-ASP to Akkodis ASP this year, was already recognized as a top player in the European GT racing scene, but the Spa result was absolute proof of its abilities.

The team went on to beat defending drivers’ champion Iron Lynx to claim its first outright Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS Endurance Cup title, an achievement that Policand described as “more emotional” than the Spa win.

It missed out on the Sprint Cup title to Team WRT, although runners-up Marciello and Timur Boguslavskiy accrued 111.5 points, which would have been enough to clinch any of the four previous championships that used the current scoring system.

Moreover, the Endurance and Sprint results pooled together to yield the combined GTWC Europe teams’ crown.

Akkodis ASP achieved success on the intercontinental stage, too, as it beat the factory-driven cars from Ferrari and Audi to win the Kyalami 9 Hour in February. It also ran France’s GT Cup gold medal-winning Mercedes-AMG at the FIA Motorsport Games.

The honor roll continued courtesy of the team’s extensive GT4 program, which secured the GT4 European Series Pro-Am crown with Jean-Luc Beaubelique and Jim Pla, as well as the Am championship for teams.

Racking up such an array of titles is a testament to ASP’s workforce, many of whom are at the track week in, week out for most of the year. Their perseverance and the team’s long-standing commitment were finally rewarded in 2022 with some major silverware.

Now the task will be to defend the Endurance Cup title and, hardest of all, the Spa victory to further solidify ASP as one of the leading customer teams in GT racing.

Honorable Mentions

***The way in which JOTA steamrolled the LMP2 competition at Le Mans is worthy of mention itself, but the sheer consistency of its No. 38 Oreca 07 Gibson over the rest of the FIA World Endurance Championship was also impressive. Both of its WEC entries were strong and point to a well-oiled machine that is the product of years at work. That suggests the British squad will have no fear of taking on the Hypercar factory teams when it gets its hands on a customer Porsche 963.

***Another part of the wave of Hypercar-bound teams entering LMP2, Italian outfit Prema arrived with lofty expectations based on its single-seater prowess. It dominated the European Le Mans Series at the first attempt, and while its WEC season wasn’t as successful, it was still competitive against the more established outfits. Expect it to make significant strides next year as it prepares for the Lamborghini LMDh program under its Iron Lynx partnership.

***The stakes were raised for some of North America’s leading GTD teams with the launch of the new GTD Pro class, but Canada’s Pfaff Motorsports made the transition with aplomb. The reigning GTD champion secured the Pro title with Matt Campbell and Mathieu Jaminet, beating the factory-linked programs of Corvette Racing, Vasser Sullivan and BMW Team RLL. The championship run saw Pfaff’s No. 9 Porsche 911 GT3 R win five races including the Rolex 24 at Daytona.