Eventful weekend for Young Driver AMR at the Nürburgring. At the penultimate round of the ADAC GT Masters, Young Driver AMR made a strong comeback to the front of the championship with its pair of Aston Martin V12 Vantage GT3. Under the eyes of Aston Martin chairman David Richards, who was the team's guest at the Nürburgring, Ferdinand and Johannes Stuck led the first part of race one and finished fourth in the second heat. Kristian Poulsen and Christoffer Nygaard finished ninth in the first race and scored yet another victory for Poulsen in the amateur championship.
That the Nürburgring suits the Aston Martin V12 Vantage was already evident on Friday, when Ferdinand and Johannes Stuck opened the race weekend with the fasted time in free practise. It marked the first time, the Aston Martin V12 Vantage ended on top of a practise session in the highly competitive German series. In race one, it was then Ferdinand Stuck, who impressed in the first half our. Stuck took the lead in the first corner, never looked back and subsequently built a gap of 5,5 seconds before he handed over the V12-powered Aston Martin to his older brother Johannes. But due to a slightly too short pit stop, the Stucks were penalised with a stop-and-go-penalty and dropped to sixth. The great race of the Stuck brothers came to an unfortunate end, when Johannes Stuck crashed into the wall on the very last lap.
From this moment on, a real challenge started for Young Driver AMR, as the crew had to repair the heavily damaged Aston Martin. Parts were ordered at Aston Martin Racing and sent to Germany overnight. The team burnt the midnight oil, assembled the car when parts arrived at track at 08:00 o'clock Sunday morning and made it to the starting grid in time. The Stuck's thanked the team with a strong race and briefly missed the podium when they finished fourth, only 3,8 behind the race-winning Corvette.
While the Stucks were denied points in the first race due to the crash late in the race, the two Danes Kristian Poulsen and Christoffer Nygaard drove a strong race and finished ninth after starting from 18th position. This secured two championship points and the fourth win of the season for Poulsen in the amateur championship. Sunday's race started for the two Danes with a damper. Nygaard was blocked at the start, lost many positions and in the second lap, an Audi spun him and he dropped back to last position. In a great comeback drive, Poulsen/Nygaard managed to finish in 15th position. Poulsen maintained his championship ambitions with a second place in the amateur championship. Before the final round at Hockenheim in less then two weeks, Poulsen is second in the amateur standing with a gap of 24 points to the leader, while there still 50 points on the table in the remaining two races.
"It was a good end an rather eventful weekend", Young Driver AMR team principal Hardy Fischer said. "Kudos to my team on which I can always rely on and which has taken the extraordinary effort to ensure we were on the grid with two cars. It's nice that the mechanics were rewarded for their hard work with a fourth place. It's a shame that Christoffer was spun in race two, otherwise they could have scored a good result also. In the amateur class, it looks very promising for the final race at Hockenheim. After this weekend we have now some work to do and will prepare ourselves in best possible way for a great final round at Hockenheim."
Driver quotes after the race:
Johannes Stuck: "This was a great team effort in today's race after my fault in yesterday's heat. One cannot appreciate enough what the mechanics did. The team did an unbelievable job to ensure that we were on the grid. But we had to skip the warm up session and thus couldn't bed in the brakes. This cost us a bit brake performance in the race and we couldn't attack, otherwise it would also have been possible to finish on the podium."
Ferdinand Stuck: "We've finally made it into the top-5. A trophy would have been very nice, but unfortunately we had some problems with the brakes. But we had a flawless race. I was hoping for a mistake of the Mercedes in front of me to take third place, but this mistake never came."
Kristian Poulsen: "Unfortunately, we lost a lot of positions at the start and Chris was also spun around. I'm not very satisfied with my performance this weekend. I missed a bit in every corner and really don't know why."
Christoffer Nygaard: "At the start a Mercedes blocked me and as he had more torque, I could not drive around him. When I finally found a gap, I already lost a few places. To make things worse, an Audi spun me. This was really bad for us, because we really had the speed this weekend for a much better result then our ninth place in the first race."
Soure: Team