Fassnacht Hoping to Complete Sprint Season After VIR Sweep

Matt Fassnacht is aiming to put a program together to complete the Pirelli GT4 America Sprint season after winning both races at Virginia International Raceway last time out.

The Murillo Racing driver, who is running full-season in GT4 America SprintX East with Christian Szymczak, made an initially one-off Sprint appearance in Virginia three weeks ago.

He’s back this weekend at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park after claiming both race wins at VIR, and is looking to put together a program to complete the season and fight for the championship.

“Obviously, coming off of the two wins at VIR, it puts me into the championship hunt, both overall and for the Am series,” he told Sportscar365.

“While I want to run a series and win championships, I have some limiting factors. One of which is time, but more important a lot of the time in racing it comes down to funding.

“I’ve been working on sources of funding, and the likelihood of me continuing in Sprint is a combination of how well I do this weekend and my ability to raise some funding in the short-term.

“I don’t know how it’s going to play out because the results are going to be in on Sunday at 6 p.m. and the trucks are rolling the next day and they’re going to Sonoma or dropping my car off at Rochester.

“I’ve got a very small window to figure it out and resolve the major issue, which is funding.”

Fassnacht heads to CTMP placed fifth in the overall GT4 Sprint standings and third in the Am standings, with 50 points in each: 18 off the lead overall and 15 points down on the Am leader.

This is despite him only entering two of the five races so far, missing the first three rounds in St. Pete and Long Beach.

“Mathematically, in the Am, I could probably leave [CTMP] with the championship lead if things went my way, it’s that close,” he explained.

“A couple of rounds, with a 25-point win and an 18-point second place, that’s a pretty big delta. I’d have to do really, really well this weekend and have some more luck like I had at VIR obviously.

“It’s possible to be right in the championship hunt with four more weekends, eight rounds to go, after this weekend. The numbers work out if I do well this weekend.”

In addition to his partial Sprint campaign, Fassnacht and Szymczak sit fourth in the SprintX East Am standings.

“It is surprising that I’ve gotten the kind of results I’ve gotten, and frankly, with Christian in SprintX, the results we haven’t gotten that we should have gotten,” he said.

“I think our results there are a fraction of the tale of what we’ve actually done at the track. We’ve just had some unfortunate racing situations and hopefully that goes better.

“In Sprint, that was kind of mindblowing, frankly, at VIR!”

Ryan Myrehn contributed to this report.