Ford GT Briscoe
Geoffrey Harris11 Jan 2016
NEWS

MOTORSPORT: Briscoe loves Ford’s GT 'beast'

Signs are good for Blue Oval’s new Le Mans car after three-day Daytona test

Taming the beast
Ford’s new GT supercar is on the money for its endurance racing debut, with Australian driver Ryan Briscoe tweeting after three days of testing at Daytona: “Can’t tell you how much I love driving this beast.”

Briscoe’s car was second fastest in its class, GT Le Mans, in four of the six sessions it was on the 5.696km road course at the famed Daytona venue in Florida.

It had missed the first session because a hydraulic failure on team owner Chip Ganassi’s transporter delayed getting it on the ground.

Its best lap, 1:45.269 seconds in the fourth session, was set by Briscoe’s British co-driver Richard Westbrook.

German Stefan Mucke will be the third driver in the sleek GT – with a 3.5-litre Ecoboost six-cylinder engine – for America’s premier endurance race, the Daytona 24-Hour, at the end of the month.

Little separated the new BMW M6s, the Chevrolet Corvette C7.Rs, the turbo Fords and Ferrari 488s, and Porsche 911 RSRs in the GTLM-class trials at the ‘Roar before the 24’.

BMWs and Corvettes each led three of the seven practice sessions and a Ferrari the other, but both of Ganassi’s Ford GTs were within one or two tenths of a second a lap of the leaders most of the time, with the Porsches a little slower.

The fastest lap in the class was set by German Lucas Luhr, a BMW factory driver, in the first session, at 1:45.088 seconds.

German Dirk Muller crashed the second Ford in Sunday morning’s sixth session, but it returned to the track with a new nose for the final session.

IndyCar star Sebastien Bourdais and American Joey Hand will share that car with Muller in the Daytona 24-Hour, the opening round of the US Sports Car Championship.

The GT is Ford’s weapon for its return to France’s Le Mans in June, on the 50th anniversary of its first outright victory there with its revered GT40, driven by New Zealanders Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon.

Four of the latest GTs could be in the field – Ganassi’s pair plus another two that will be run in the entire World Endurance Championship by British team Multimatic.

Ganassi’s two Ford Ecoboost-powered Riley prototypes that will vie for outright victory at the Daytona 24-Hour ran conservatively at the ‘Roar before the 24’.

One of them missed most of the first day’s testing after Canadian teenager Lance Stroll, now the Williams Formula 1 team’s test driver after leaving the Ferrari Academy, crashed it on his out lap.

The other, the defending race winner and with NZ’s IndyCar champion Scott Dixon among its four drivers, lost its rear bodywork at one point avoiding a slower Porsche.

The fastest lap of the ‘Roar’ was 1:39.249 set in the last session by Brazilian sports car rookie Pipo Derani in a Honda-powered Ligier JS entered by Extreme Speed Motorsports.

Eight cars bettered 1:40 during the weekend and the top five were all Le Mans Prototype 2-spec cars with Japanese engines (two Hondas, two Mazdas and one Nissan).

Don Panoz’s arrow-fronted DeltaWing DWC13 was surprisingly fast after little success in three years of racing.

“Being on the pace and up with the leaders shows just how much we’re improving – and I still feel we have more to give,” said Katherine Legge, the former IndyCar racer now driving for Panoz.

F1 loses its first lady
The first woman to race in Formula 1, Italian Maria Teresa de Filippis, died at the weekend, aged 89.

De Filippis started three grands prix in 1958, driving a Maserati 250F.

She finished 10th and last at Spa in Belgium after failing to finish in Portugal and in her home race at Monza, near where her funeral will be held – led by Ferrari’s F1 priest, Don Sergio Mantovani.

De Filippis often told of “difficulties and misunderstandings” she had to overcome in racing.

When she tried to enter the 1958 French GP she was told by race director Toto Roche: “The only helmet a beautiful woman should wear is the one at the hairdressers".

She failed to qualify at Monaco in 1958, as did Bernie Ecclestone – F1’s commercial supremo for the past four decades.

De Filippis retired in 1959 after again failing to qualify at Monaco and the death of Frenchman Jean Behra, then her Porsche team leader, in a sports car race.

Another Italian, Lella Lombardi, who died of cancer in 1992, was the most successful female racer in F1, finishing sixth in the 1975 Spanish GP.

Susie Wolff, wife of reigning world champion Mercedes’ team principal Toto Wolff, retired at the end of last season after having been the Williams team’s test driver without getting a race seat.

The Lotus team, recently reacquired by Renault, has a Spaniard Carmen Jorda as a development driver, although her limited racing record suggests that it is mainly for promotional purposes – and may not continue long under the new ownership.

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Written byGeoffrey Harris
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