After a lot of switching forth and back, the original Iron Dames line-up is back together.
The team, which will be competing in both the European Le Mans Series and the FIA World Endurance Championship this year, has had a lot of driver swaps over the last couple of weeks.
The original plan was for the three drivers, who have raced in the ELMS together, Michelle Gatting, Rahel Frey, and Manuela Gostner, to move into FIA WEC as a pairing. Frey and Gostner would also continue in the European Le Mans Series, teamed up with Katherine Legge.
Those planes changed two weeks ago, where Gatting and Legge swapped seats, and Gostner was replaced in the ELMS by Esmee Hawkey. But it turned out, that Hawkey was actually not a Bronze-rated driver due to an error. So that wouldn’t work out in the ELMS, since a Bronze is mandatory in the car.
So they can come up with a name plan, that turns out to be Manuela Gostner once again sharing a car with Rahel Frey and Michelle Gatting.
That has been a lot of musical chairs in a short time span, but at least these three drivers know each other already.
Gostner will have a double role during the ELMS weekends – or rather Michelin Le Mans Cup, since she is announced to share one with Doriane Pin. That will give her some extra running during the weekend, but she will have to get used to the GT3 car with ABS, switching to a GTE car without ABS. But she has run in both types of cars in the past, so that will probably be an easy swap for her.
The team will run in the European Le Mans Series with a Ferrari 488 GTE Evo #83, while a Ferrari 488 GT3 #9 will be the car for Michelin Le Mans Cup – both series under the Iron Lynx banner, who runs the Iron Dames programme.
The ELMS team tests yesterday and today, while the LMC team will test tomorrow, prior to the first races for both series this weekend. All of this happens at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain.