Vermeulen wins at Zandvoort in the car Green had already taken to the front

Thierry Vermeulen won the second GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup race at Zandvoort in front of a home crowd, and he did it in a car that his team-mate had already dragged from third on the grid to the lead.

Ben Green started the number 69 Emil Frey Racing Ferrari 296 GT3 Evo from third, passed Louis Prette on the inside in the opening seconds, took Konsta Lappalainen at the restart after an early safety car, and handed the car to Vermeulen with a gap. Vermeulen brought it home 3.700 seconds clear of Bastian Buus after 36 laps.

Green did the damage and Vermeulen finished it

The race turned on the first stint. Green was the quickest away on the front two rows and had the Garage 59 McLaren before the field had settled. When the safety car came in he went straight past the pole-sitting sister car, and from there he built enough of a margin that the pit stop never put the lead in danger.

Emil Frey then split its two cars. Green came in first for the undercut, Lappalainen stayed out a lap longer, and when both had cycled through it was the number 69 in front. Matteo Cairoli took over the number 14 and finished third, 1.564 behind Buus, having set the fastest lap of the race at 1:34.462. The winning car never set the quickest lap.

Vermeulen called it a great result for the whole team, and said they had all worked so hard. “We had the better car the whole weekend,” he said. “We have a tough season and never gave up. Zandvoort is a track which suits us.” Green, who did the overtaking, was happy with his stint.

Fleming threw away the Garage 59 weekend at the Hugenholtzbocht

The number 58 McLaren had been at the front of every session at Zandvoort. Second in Qualifying 1, winner of Race 1, second in Qualifying 2, third on the road in the opening stint of Race 2. Thomas Fleming took it over from Prette, lost the podium in the pit cycle, and was running fifth and recovering when he put the number 31 Team WRT BMW out of the race at the Hugenholtzbocht.

The stewards called it causing a collision and gave him a ten second stop and go. With the pit lane transit on top of the ten seconds stationary, the penalty cost him around half a minute in the closing stages. He rejoined 25th and finished there, sixth in the Gold Cup.

The Gold Cup win went instead to Tommaso Mosca and Matias Zagazeta in the AF Corse Ferrari, sixth overall.

One corner accounted for four incidents in two days

The Hugenholtzbocht has shaped this whole meeting. On Saturday the number 31 stopped there during Race 1 and the number 71 Ferrari lost control at the same place and lost its bonnet. On Sunday Christopher Haase spun the Eastalent Audi there in the opening minutes and brought out the safety car, and then Fleming put the number 31 out there as well.

Four separate incidents at one corner across two race days, and the same car caught up in two of them.

Eleventh in the Pro Cup, and a weekend without a point

Charles Weerts and Kelvin van der Linde came to Zandvoort second in the Sprint Cup standings, 2.5 points behind Dani Juncadella. They leave with nothing. Van der Linde started 27th after a five-place penalty carried over from Magny-Cours, climbed to 20th in the opening laps and then stalled, and Weerts brought the car home 15th.

In the Pro Cup that is eleventh. The tenth and last position that pays, worth half a point, went to Dean Macdonald in the second Garage 59 McLaren, two places ahead of them. They missed the only score available to them by one place, a day after retiring from Race 1 with a technical failure.

Team WRT had a strange afternoon. Valentino Rossi took over the number 46 from Max Hesse and finished fourth, the team’s best result of the weekend, while the number 31 was put out by Fleming and their title-chasing car finished outside the points.

Buus takes twelve points out of the title fight

Second place gives Bastian Buus and Ricardo Feller twelve points in the Pro Cup and twelve overall. Feller started the car sixth, was the fastest of anyone through Scheivlak, worked his way past the AF Corse Ferrari to fourth, and the stop lifted the car to second past both the Garage 59 McLaren and the second Emil Frey.

The gap between the two AF Corse cars and the Winward Mercedes-AMG of Lucas Auer settled the rest of the Pro order. Dani Juncadella brought the Verstappen Racing Mercedes home ninth, eighth in the Pro Cup, from a car that qualified 27th on Saturday and 15th on Sunday and was quicker in the race than in either session. Morris Schuring finished 11th and ninth in class in the Boutsen VDS Porsche that took pole on Saturday.

The result at Zandvoort

The gap column is to the car ahead. Five cars retired: the number 84 of Haase, the number 89 Lionspeed Porsche of Nicolas Baert in the gravel, the number 11 Comtoyou Aston Martin, the number 7 of Nicki Thiim, and the number 31 after the contact with Fleming.

Our surprise at how the weekend turned

Our surprise is how little the championship had to do with the racing. The two quickest cars belonged to a team with nothing at stake in the Pro title, the most consistent car of the weekend threw its Sunday away with a penalty, and the drivers lying second in the standings spent two days out of position and scored nothing at all. Zandvoort did not change the order at the top of the table so much as make it look fragile.

Barcelona decides it

One round of the Sprint Cup remains, at Barcelona, with two races and a maximum of 35 points available including the point for pole in each qualifying session. We will work through who can still take the title once the official standings are published.