Sainteloc Planning to Continue With Audi Next Year

Sainteloc Junior Team intends to remain with Audi in Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS next year despite the manufacturer ending its GT3 factory support.

The French squad is one of Audi’s longest-serving European customers, having competed in GTWC Europe Endurance Cup with different iterations of the R8-based GT3 car since 2012.

It also took Audi’s most recent CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa victory in 2017 with Christopher Haase, Markus Winkelhock and Jules Gounon driving.

Sporting director Frederic Thalamy told Sportscar365 that Sainteloc intends to keep running the Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II due to the high cost of switching manufacturers.

Audi announced last month that it will shutter its factory support in GT racing, including the closure of its works driver pool and a phasing out of new car production.

“We stay with Audi,” Thalamy confirmed. “With the new cars, the budgets are over the sky now. So we will stay with Audi, minimum one year.

“If you want two new cars with the full package, it’s minimum two million [Euros].

“And you don’t know which support you have on the back. We have to wait to see which manufacturer will be most interesting in terms of support and so on.

Thalamy appeared undeterred by the release of Audi’s factory drivers at the end of this year, which is one of the major parts of the restructuring initiated by the company board.

“If we want to stay with them, we can do a contract,” he said.

“In this case, we can have this discussion with Audi. With Audi, this is a human company. What they are doing now… the team is a number, the car is a number, the driver is a number. This is what they are doing. But they are not like this in Audi Sport: it is human.

“[Audi] decided to kill everything, but we have been working for a long time, so we will find a solution together [with Audi Sport]. Whatever the solution, we will find a solution.”

The Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II remains eligible next year and the brand’s head of customer racing Chris Reinke has recently indicated that it could be around until the early 2030s.

Furthermore, parts supply next year will be outsourced to German company Eila, which has been a partner of Audi Sport customer racing in that area since 2017.

“We have exactly the same support from Audi with the engineers,” said Thalamy, whose team currently runs two Audis in Endurance Cup and three in Sprint Cup.

“The car will be exactly the same. We know the car. For young guys who want to start in GT3 and understand all the systems, it could be a good school.

“And if they want to run with a Pro driver, find a Pro driver with a lot of experience. Winky [Markus Winkelhock], Miesy [Christopher Mies], [Patric] Niederhauser… plenty of guys.

“There is Fanatec, Creventic, a lot of series where we will have the best support for our customers. But [if there is] no support from our customers, we won’t do it.”

Despite envisioning little change in the way his team operates Audis next year, Thalamy reckons a potential difficulty could be the loss of Audi’s factory influence in Balance of Performance dialogue with GTWC Europe series organizer SRO Motorsports Group.

“The manufacturer works a lot with Claude Surmont [SRO technical director],” he said.

“Next year we don’t have any lobbying with Audi; it will be with the team. It’s completely different. This is, for me, the main issue.”