GruppeM Firms Up Bathurst 12H Entry

GruppeM Racing has announced it will return to the Repco Bathurst 12 Hour with factory support from Mercedes-AMG.

The Hong Kong outfit will enter the Intercontinental GT Challenge season opener on Feb. 16-18 with its Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo, but has yet to name drivers.

GruppeM will head to Bathurst having won the most recent round of the IGTC, last month’s Gulf 12 Hours at Abu Dhabi, with Luca Stolz, Maro Engel and Mikael Grenier.

Team owner Kenny Chen indicated to Sportscar365 at the Abu Dhabi event that the Hong Kong-based squad was working on plans to return to the IGTC this year after a 2023 campaign in which the team helped Mercedes-AMG win the manufacturer’s championship.

Engel and Grenier formed two thirds of the squad’s 2023 Bathurst 12H lineup along with Raffaele Marciello, the trio finishing just 1.4 seconds adrift of the winning SunEnergy1 Racing Mercedes-AMG after a late unscheduled stop.

That result marked GruppeM’s third on-the-road podium finish in as many attempts at Bathurst, although a post-race penalty robbed the team of a second-place finish in 2020.

It was forced to skip the race altogether in 2022 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic before returning to the grid in 2023.