The
Ford GT’s return to endurance racing has probably not been the thunderous success the Blue Oval was hoping for. The 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of
Sebring were rough, but fresh off the
new car’s first victory, at the short, two-hour Monterey
Grand Prix at
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, the team probably thought it’d worked out the bugs in the two EcoBoost-powered cars. Then it got to Spa.
Five hours into the WEC’s Six Hours of Spa, the number 66 GTE Pro Ford GT driven by Stefan Muecke suffered an awful crash while exiting Eau Rouge towards Raidillon, the track’s most famous and dangerous section. Based on the video, it looks like Muecke lost the driver’s side rear tire right at the point it was under the heaviest load – turning right in Eau Rouge – causing a spin that at most other tracks might have been harmless and mildly embarrassing. But this is Spa, and like the few other circuits from the 1920s still in use, its tiny runoff areas do not forgive spins.
Muecke’s GT impacted the tire barriers at high speed, effectively destroying the car. The saving grace is that because of the nature of the spin, the passenger’s side of the car took the heaviest damage.
According to Fox Sports,
Ford said Muecke was “conscious and relatively okay” after the impact. He was later checked out and cleared at the medical center.
If you don’t want to know the race results, here is your
official spoiler alert warning.
Not that it’s a surprise anymore, but the
Audi R18 of Lucas Di Grassi, Loïc Duval, and Oliver Jarvis won with a two-lap lead over the closest
Porsche 919 Hybrid. Gustavo Menezes, Nicolas LaPierre, and Stéphane Richelmi took the LMP2 victory with their Nissan-Alpine A460, while Ford’s other GT (Marino Franchitti, Andy Priaulx, and Harry Tincknell) lost out on the GTE Pro win to the
Ferrari 488 GTE of Davide Rigon and Sam Bird. Paul Dalla Lana, Pedro Lamy, and Mathias Lauda took the GTE Am win in an
Aston Martin V8 Vantage.
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