At the end of qualifying, the fastest Pro car was the Manthey Racing Porsche 997 GT3 R, driven by Marc Lieb, winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours GTE-Pro category this year. It sounds that they will be a serious contender for the Superpole this afternoon. “We will definitely play the game and try to catch the pole position, we are competitors, be the fastest is our goal, that’s why we are here,” said Olaf Manthey, team manager.
However, the Porsche will take its chance with the race set-up, in order to complete the knowledge of the Pirelli tires. “During the pre-qualifying and qualifying sessions, we worked in order to define the best set-up for the race. We tried to improve our car according to the data obtained during the official Test Day - under the rain - and a previous private practice session, that was made on a dry track.”
“We really needed to do those tests, in order to understand the Pirelli tires used in the Blancpain Endurance Series.”
Even if the Porsche 997 GT3 R has a good engine architecture to run on a wet track, they’re convinced that the BMW have the best package in those conditions, knowing that the better mechanical grip of the Porsche is not that useful on this track, with not much acceleration area.
For Manthey, coming with only one car is not a weakness. They are really confident in their engineers, mechanics and driver line-up, and estimate that when the global package is that good and professional; one car can be enough to win the race, even in front of teams that are racing with more cars. “Motorsport is like a gear box! You need every single little piece to be at the top to have the complete thing to work fine”, concluded Olaf Manthey.