Renger van der Zande will get to race at Fuji International Speedway, when the 5th round of the FIA World Endurance Championship will run there in two weeks’ time.
The Dutchman will sub for Nico Müller at Vector Sport in the LMP2 category, since Müller will be racing in DTM that weekend, as mentioned in a previous article.
Van der Zande hasn’t raced for the team before, but is a teammate to Sebastien Bourdais in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in the USA. They are sharing a Cadillac DPI car, so they already know each other very well.
That makes Ryan Cullen the only driver of the car during the full 2022 season. The season opener at Sebring saw Bourdais locked to his Cadillac Racing commitments, so he had to focus on the DPI car that weekend – which isn’t unusual for the Super Sebring event, where not all drivers are allowed to race in both races. Mike Rockenfeller was the replacement at that round.
Photo: JJ Media
Vector Sport are brand new in sportscar racing in 2022, but has a lot of experienced people on the pit wall and in the garage. After a very difficult start to the year for them, they finally achieved a positive result at the 6 Hours of Monza in July, and finished third in the LMP2 category with Cullen, Bourdais and Müller
Their title hopes are long gone, with zero points at both Sebring and Le Mans, putting them so far off in the standings, that even third place is impossible – unless everybody ahead of them fails to score at both Fuji and Bahrain, which is highly unlikely.
The 6 Hours of Fuji will be run on 11 September 2022.
