Photo: BMW
Dries Vanthoor says he is aiming to maintain his run of starts in the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa despite his absence from Team WRT’s full-season GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS lineup, with the Belgian hinting he will still do “a few” races in the series.
As revealed earlier this month, Vanthoor is set to go absent from WRT’s GTWC Europe driver squad for the first time in his sports car racing career.
This comes as a result of his increased LMDh commitments, which will see him part of full season efforts in both the FIA World Endurance Championship and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
The program shift marks something of an end of an era for Vanthoor, who competed in every single Endurance and Sprint Cup round since 2016, racking up 22 race wins and consecutive three Sprint Cup drivers’ titles alongside Charles Weerts.
Kelvin van der Linde is set to take Vanthoor’s place in WRT’s Pro effort this upcoming season, teaming with Weerts for the full-ten round calendar while new BMW factory signing Ugo de Wilde joins for the enduros.
Vanthoor, for his part, hinted that he could still make cameo appearances in GTWC Europe this year.
“I will still keep doing it, but I’ve done it for a long time and I’ve enjoyed it as well,” Vanthoor told Sportscar365.
“I have a very nice program to replace that with. The plan was to do a few races this year. At the moment I will have to wait and see which one they will be.
“I will still do a few but indeed it won’t be all of them anymore. At the end of the day, I’m driving a nice car, driving nice championships, nice tracks.
“So it’s a bit of it’s an upgrade but you leave a long [term] thing at the side but at the end of the day, it is what it is.”
When asked specifically about the 24H Spa, Vanthoor said: “For me, that will be the one. Because I’m a Belgian driver, so doing 24 Hours of Spa will be quite logical.”
Vanthoor has not missed an edition of the Ardennes classic since 2016, finishing third last year and coming close to victory in 2021, only to be overtaken by Iron Lynx driver Alessandro Pier Guidi with nine minutes to go.
Roos: GT3 Lineup Decisions “Made Because of the Calendar”
BMW’s presence in the top class of the Endurance Cup has halved compared to last year, with both WRT and ROWE Racing scaling back from two cars to instead field a single BMW M4 GT3 EVO each.
This year, BMW’s lineup choices have been affected by both an unusually busy June with three back-to-back 24-hour races, as well as its smaller LMDh driver pool.
The brand has gone from 12 LMDh drivers to eight, with Nick Yelloly and Maxime Martin both leaving the brand entirely while Connor De Phillippi and Jesse Krohn have shifted to GT3 duties instead.
Instead, BMW opted to deploy Vanthoor and Sheldon van der Linde across both WEC and the WeatherTech Championship in a full-time capacity, with the latter also going absent from DTM this year as a result.
Additionally, Vanthoor, van der Linde, Marco Wittmann and Philipp Eng will also all miss the Nürburgring 24 as that event clashes with the Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen.
Andreas Roos, head of BMW M Motorsport, indicated that the brand’s GT3 lineups were created from a top-down approach, starting with its LMDh commitments, while the busy calendar was also a key factor.
“First of all, the decisions are made because of calendar and calendar clashes at the end,” Roos told Sportscar365.
“We started coming from our top [class] program. This was the first thing we decided, how our driver lineups will look like there and how we share the drivers between the two programs in the IMSA and then the WEC championship.
“This automatically told you which drivers you can use for GT World Challenge and all of this. And then also clashes in the calendar, then having the big 24-hour races all in a row.
“I was clear from the beginning when the calendars was out that this will be a big struggle for us manufacturers, but also on the human side and having all the people at the right place at the right time.
“At the end, we started from the top and went down and then decided how many cars we will have in the championships and then which drivers we will take.
“For us it’s very important also as we have for example in GT World Challenge, we have a lot of cars running there.
“But it’s also important to have equal spread between our teams to give everybody the same cards to play at the game in the championship and this is very important.
“At the end let’s say with our two factory supported teams like ROWE and WRT I think we have good driver lineups there and really looking forward to see how they perform in the championship.”
