Preining: Lionspeed “Always Thought We Could Win”

Thomas Preining always believed that winning the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa was possible even though the victorious Lionspeed GP Porsche 911 GT3 R Evo he shared with Ricardo Feller and Bastian Buus had to start from the pit lane.

The Porsche factory driver insisted that the team “always kept believing” even after it knew it would begin its race after the rest of the field following an engine change in the wake of first qualifying on Thursday.

“I always thought we could still win,” said Preining. “With the safety cars there is always potential, but obviously getting it done is something else.

“That isn’t always related to your starting position: it’s about how the race comes to you or doesn’t come to you.”

Preining explained that the rubbering in of the track over the course of the 24 hours was crucial in Lionspeed emerging as a potential winner on Sunday morning.

“The track came to us today in terms of balance,” he said. “In the beginning of the race the balance wasn’t 100 percent, but at the end it was perfect — and this can only be track evolution.”

Preining paid tribute to a strategic call by the German squad to bring him in to pit out of third place a lap ahead of schedule with four and a half hours to go.

The move allowed him to get the undercut on both the leading No. 48 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo and the second-placed No. 22 Schumacher CLRT Porsche to take the lead.

“It was a call we made collectively: I told the team I could not overtake and we had to do it on strategy,” he explained. “We had the pace, but only in clean air; we saw that not only in the battles for position but also in lapped traffic.

“We are really fast in the corners, in mid-corner especially, but that is not the best way to overtake.”

Preining said the team did a “phenomenal job” in its first 24 Hours of Spa after expanding its operation to encompass a Pro class car in the GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS for the first time this year.

“It is not like we won with a lucky punch as a bunch of rookies,” he said. “The team has hired a lot of crew members who are very experienced and engineers who have worked in the Pro category.

“Management brought together a group that not only have the right qualities but can also work together.

“I think it is a special group of people.”

Lionspeed had retired from both of the opening rounds of the GTWC Europe Endurance Cup when in contention for potential podiums, but Feller was not concerned about any late mechanical woes at Spa.

“I was not worried because we solved the problems we had,” he said. “We drove Nürburgring 24 until the flag and we had zero problems, so it was all OK.

“To have a double DNF in Endurance so far is not nice, even though we were on our way to a podium both times probably so now it feels even better to tick off the biggest one.”