The upcoming weekend will be incredibly busy for all the sportscar drivers around the world.
The WeatherTech SportsCar Championship will race with GTLM and GTD in the USA at Virginia International Raceway. The FIA World Endurance Champoionship and European Le Mans Series will be at Silverstone in Great Britain. VLN will race in Germany at the Nürburgring, and last but not least, the ADAC GT Masters will race at Zandvoort in The Netherlands.
That will make all the drivers extremely busy, and naturally hard to be in more than one location at a time.
KÜS Team75 Bernhard is one of the teams getting into these issues. Kevin Estre usually shared car #17 with Timo Bernhard, but Estre is works driver at Porsche, and currently leads the GTE Pro category alongside Michael Christensen, so the FIA WEC programme has a higher priority than ADAC GT Masters.
But who are you going to replace him with, when all over Porsche works drivers already race somewhere in the world? Well, you call a friend and ask if he would be interested in participating.
Photo: Gruppe C Photography
And of course, Marc Lieb was up for the job. The German Le Mans winner and World Champion from 2016 is currently the working on the Porsche Costumer Racing programme, with GT3 and GT4 cars around the world. He gets the chance to jump into a car every now, as we saw with Proton Competition at the ELMS test at Paul Richard, utilizing his large amount of experience.
A driver who is going the other way is Mikkel Jensen. His ADAC GT Masters programme with BMW Team Schnitzer has first priority compared to his ELMS programme for AT Racing. So Jensen is in The Netherlands and not Great Britain this weekend.
We are still waiting on the final ADAC GT Masters entry list, so we will only know later in the week, if others have chosen ADAC GT Masters over something else. Our guess is that VLN will really be hurt by these date clashes, but we will know soon.
