17 March 2016
Maranello, 17 March 2016 – This weekend sees the start of the VdeV Endurance championship, which runs over seven rounds and is now in its tenth season. The first race takes place this Sunday at the Barcelona circuit and runs for a duration of four hours.
Two 458s at the start. Two Ferrari 458 Italias are taking part in the season opener and of course one of them is the Visiom team’s entry, reigning champion with Frenchmen Thierry Perrier, Jean-Paul Pagny and Jean-Bernard Bouvet. AF Corse also has a car, entrusted to the Italian duo of Mario Cordoni and Marco Zanuttini. These two cars were on second and third spot of the podium in last year’s race.
Tradition. The Barcelona track has always looked kindly on Ferrari, with the marque taking almost 40 wins here. The first dates back to 1999, when Emmanuel Collard and Vincezo Sospiri took the win in the first SportsRacing World Cup at the wheel of the 333SP entered by JB Giesse Team. On that day, Prancing Horse cars took the top six places. The latest win came last season, as part of the International GT Open series: in Race-2, victory went to Ezequiel Perez-Companc and Raffaele Giammaria for AF Corse; the previous day Ilya Melnikov and Claudio Sdanewitsch had dominated in Race-1 of the Am class.