6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps Preview

Our second trip to Spa in the 2018/2019 Super Season takes place at a time when the teams, across all four classes, have built up a considerable depth of experience and momentum in the championship. This time last year we had a dry race with brilliant sunshine from beginning to end, but the forecast for the race tomorrow is for winter temperatures with rain and even snow. Our Spa 6 Hours preview will give you an insight into what we can expect tomorrow.

It will come as no surprise to learn that Toyota led the LMP1 championship table by a country mile (151 points) from Rebellion Racing (98 points). In the LMP2 class, it was a different matter with the cars much closer together. Here, the #37 Jackie Chan DC Racing car has 130 points with the second placed #36 Signatech Alpine Matmut car with 125 points.

In the GTE Pro class, Porsche are well ahead of the rest of the field with 227 points, followed by Ferrari on 127 points. Project 1 (Porsche) lead the GTE Am class with 103 points with Spirit of Race (Ferrari) second on 78 points. The Porsche works team has really come on in leaps and bounds with the new mid-engined 911 RSR, and with the BoP being calculated more objectively than before, they are feeling the benefits. This has also filtered down into the GTE Am class where the Porsches are coming out on top more frequently than before.

Free Practice 1

FP1 was held from 12h00 to 13h30 on Thursday in dry, mild conditions. As can be expected, there was very little to read into the lap times, and even the #8 Toyota only posted the third quickest time with its sister car, the #7 Toyota one position further back.

I had decided, along with several other photographers, to position myself at the bottom of Eau Rouge for the start of the session, moving up to the top of the hill as the session progressed. Very long story short, a new ‘red zone’ had been imposed there, which had not been communicated to those who needed to know. The long and the short of it is that photographers are no longer permitted to get that classic shot of the cars coming down the hill towards Eau Rouge at the start, or at any stage of the race for that matter. However, life moves on and you must do what you can, when you can.

The session was used by most teams as an opportunity to just get their cars set up and out on track, as Spa was the first European race of the year, and the cars had just been unpacked after the Sebring race. This being the situation, the cars were simply given an outing to provide feedback to the teams.