| ||||
 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||
 |
Victory went to the Larbre Competition on its return to the Championship
after an absence of a year and a half, with their Prodrive-built 550 Maranello.
The French team, which won three FIA GT titles between 2000 and 2002,
added another win to its impressive tally when Pedro Lamy of Portugal
and Gabriele Gardel of Switzerland were victorious. "We really did
not expect to win the race. The team did a great job," Lamy said
afterward. "My team-mate was really good, as he ran on used tyres
and did very well. I just pushed and I was able to win. I am very pleased
with that !" Fourth and fifth places also went to Maseratis, with JMB Racing's duo led by the car of Peter, Buncombe and Rusinov, which had started from pole. Bertolini and Wendlinger brought their car home in fifth, having lost a door in a collision with the GPC Ferrari 575 GTC of Belloc/Mello which was eventually classified 19th, 20 laps down. Its sister GPC car, that of Andrea Piccini/Jean Denis Deletraz fared even less well with a spin into the gravel on lap 20, followed by retirement through transmission failure on lap 43. The second Larbre 550M, driven by Bryner, Calderari and Zacchia, finished sixth after starting from the pit lane, giving Larbre second place in the Teams classification. The Russian Age Racing 550M of Bouchut/Fomenko/Vasiliev ran with the leaders early on but stopped with fuel problems. There was no Ferrari interest in the GT2 class and it was a Porsche walkover.
Click here to return to the Ferrari Happenings page.
|
A
breathtaking race got the 2005 season off to the best possible start in
Monza today. In one of the closest FIA GT races ever, three cars crossed
the finish line separated by just 1.456 seconds, after 87 laps of out
and out battle around the 5.793 km circuit. Ferrari, Maserati and Corvette
all looked like potential winners, but it was a Ferrari that won.
