After a promising qualifying and Saturday's round, the ADAC GT Masters race 2 at Lausitzring wasn't what Simona de Silvestro and Klaus Bachler were hoping for, as their weekend ended without points.
After Saturday's bad luck - where Simona de Silvestro picked up a puncture due to debris while in a good-looking seventh place in the race, on Sunday the Precote Herberth Motorsport duo was planning their revenge - but it didn't go to plan for the Swiss and Austrian co-drivers.
Simona de Silvestro went out on qualifying 2, in a very close field at the Lausitzring; unfortunately, she wasn't able to repeat the perfomance of the day before and finished the session in P25, with a gap of 1,148 seconds to the pole setter Gounon, who qualified first ahead of Perera and Engel.
Gounon defended his lead at the start and pulled away from the field until he came in for the mandatory pitstop with three seconds on his followers and handed over his car to Walilko. He was able to held the lead ahead of Stolz/Engel and Marciello/Buhk.
Later in the race, the field was bunched up together again as the Safety Car was deployed to recover the stranded Corvette of Jeffrey Schmidt. The restart gave Stolz the chance to prepare an attack on Walilko, but the Polish driver defended and took his first victory of the season together with Gounon, following their the bad luck on Saturday when their Mercedes AMG GT3 Evo had caught fire and retired from the race. Second were Stolz/Engel and third Marciello/Buhk.
Simona de Silvestro and Klaus Bachler had little luck in the race and took the chequered in 19th position, still moving up a few places. “We're just not really lucky this season,” summed up Bachler. “We try to get everything we can in the races, but we don't manage to convert the hard work into a good result of points."
"Now we hope for more luck on the remaining three race weekends."
The next chance for redemption will be at the Hockenheimring from 22nd to 24th October, followed by the last event at Nürburgring from 5th to 7th November.
