Team LNT has announced the 6 drivers for their LMP1 effort at the first round of the FIA World Endurance Championship.
The team enters two Ginetta G60-LT-P1 AER LMP1 cars, and for the opening round at Silverstone, they will enter with what easily can be described as the “young boys” and the “old boys” car.
Ben Hanley, Egor Orudzhev and Charlie Robertson will share #5. Ben Hanley arrives from the DragonSpeed team, where he raced in the LMP1 category wit their BR1 Engineering. Hanley has also flirted a bit with Indycar, where DragonSpeed was behind that effort as well.
Egor Orudzhev was a driver at SMP Racing, with the same BR1 Engineering car, which ran the exact same AER engine as the Ginetta.
Charlie Robertson is Ginetta works driver, and has been part of developing the Ginetta car, and was part of the programme too, when Manor raced a couple of weekends in 2018.
#6 will be the “old” car with Chris Dyson, Guy Smith and Mike Simpson. Chris Dyson has been racing all kinds of race cars during the past 20 years or so. He has raced the 24 Hours of Le Mans several times, but is probably mostly known from the family team Dyson Racing, which raced in the American Le Mans Series throughout many seasons.
One of the teammates for Dyson in the USA was Guy Smith. Smith has been a long time Bentley Boy, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans overall in 2003, but also raced for Audi Sport later on. He was most recently racing for Bentley again, in their GT3 programme, before he announced his retirement from professional racing in the spring 2018. But he is ready for another go in LMP1 now.
Mike Simpson is a Ginetta factory driver just like Charlie Robertson, and was also part of the development phase.
All six drivers have tried the car, either at the Prologue in Barcelona, or a private test prior to that at Paul Ricard.
The drivers have specifically only been confirmed for the race at Silverstone, so we might be up for another line-up later in the season. The race is run on 1 September 2019.