Team Black Falcon’s Total 24 Hours of Spa campaign was plagued with bad luck, but against all odds, the team was still able to finish the race, with Black Falcon #63 and its sister #18 car successfully crossing the finish line on Sunday afternoon.
At the end of three qualifying sessions between Thursday and Friday, Team Black Falcon’s three Mercedes SLS AMG GT3s were 18th, 21st and 59th on the grid.
Engine problems for the #18 Mercedes – shared between Richard Muscat, Vladimir Lunkin, Saud Turki Al Faisal and Christian Bracke – interrupted its running on Thursday which meant that it had to start the race from 59th, while car #63, driven by Adam Christodoulou, Yelmer Buurman and Mike Parisy, settled for 21st. The black and green #19 SLS AMG made it to Friday’s Super Pole after qualifying within the Top 20 in Thursday evening’s Night Qualifying.
In Friday’s Super Pole session, Andreas Simonsen, Abdulaziz Turki AlFaisal and Hubert Haupt managed eighteenth on the grid, but the race’s long and unpredictable nature rendered grid positions meaningless, and the drivers still had plenty to hope for.
When the going got tough on Saturday’s race, the tough got going. Team Black Falcon mounted a serious challenge during the race and avoided many on-track accidents to climb its way up the field.
Black Falcon #19 was well within the top 10 after just 3 hours of racing, but the awful luck returned to haunt the team as the black and green suffered from race-ending mechanical problems.
The team had to shift its focus on the remaining #63 and #18 cars. However, the two cars were to have their own share of misfortune. Black Falcon #18 was running in 21st position overall after starting from 59th, but a late-race collision broke its rear left suspension and dropped it back to 34th overall and 16th in the GT3 Pro AM class, where it ultimately finished.
The #63 Mercedes was the highest-placed Black Falcon car at the later stages of the race, running as high as P7 and in a position to gain further places, but it had to give it all up when it got struck by a rivaling car, therefore forced to pit for repairs, which dropped it to 11th place overall, in which it eventually settled.
Total 24 Hours of Spa was the fourth and penultimate round of the 2014 Blancpain Endurance Series, and despite the lack of luck, Team Black Falcon will keep on pushing for a better result at the final round of the season, the Nürburgring 1000km.