WRT presents colours and drivers

Team WRT has presented the six drivers, for their 2021 FIA World Endurance Championship and European Le Mans Series campaigns.

Their three FIA WEC will be Robin Frijns, Ferdinand Habsburg and Charles Milesi in car #31. All three drivers will have their FIA WEC debut, but Habsburg is already up to speed, having run and won in the Asian Le Mans Series in February 2021. The Austrian was at Daytona in January, just like Milesi, but none of the drivers got to race in anything but the practice, since their respective cars broke and retired, before they managed to get on board during the race.

Frijns has run in GT3 until now, within the sportscar world, where the four Audi rings on the racing suit have dictated races like Nürburgring and Spa 24 hours races. He did that on top of his DTM running with the German brand, and his current job in Formula E for Envision Virgin Racing, running an Audi power train.

Graphics: Team WRT

The ELMS car will be run by Robert Kubica, Louis Deletraz, and Yifei Ye, in the ORECA 07 Gibson car with race number #41. Kubica was meant to have had his LMP2 race debut at Daytona, where he was teammates with Habsburg at High Class Racing, but the Polish driver didn’t get a stint either, with gearbox issues ending their race. He has done a bit of GT3 racing in the past, with Dubai 24 Hours being one of the races, plus he tested the ByKolles Racing Team LMP1 car back in 2017 at Monza, where he quickly left the test since the car had some technical issues. But he is primarily known for his two periods in Formula 1 – pre-and-post his scary Rally crash.

Deletraz got his sportscar debut at Le Mans 2020, where he raced for Rebellion Racing. The team finished on a respectable fourth position, but it was clear that the three drivers hadn’t gelled 100%, with just running a single race together, in a car that none of them knew beforehand. But the young French driver was still able to show enough, to get an LMP2 shot in the ELMS.

Yifei Ye arrives directly from the Asian Le Mans Series, where he won the title alongside Habsburg. The young Chinese driver primarily raced single-seaters until now, winning the Euroformula Open Championship and the French Formula 4 Championship. He showed impressive pace in the LMP2 car, so WRT doesn’t have any worries ahead of the ELMS season.

The team has released the design of their FIA WEC car, which will run in the traditional WRT/Audi colours of red, white, and black.

The FIA World Endurance Championship is scheduled to start next month in Portimao, Portugal, while the European Le Mans Series is scheduled to start two weeks later at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain.

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