Oak Racing have replaced their engine supplier for 2010
A giant day of news with new cars, engine deals to the Le Mans Series, driver announcement to FIA GT1, rumours and a little something (laughable)from Grand Am.
CRS Racing have committed a second car to the Le Mans Series in 2010. The second car will be driven by Pierre Ehret and Phil Quaife.
"I'm absolutely delighted," said Quaife. "The target for last season was to do GT2 but it just wasn't possible due to the required budget. But racing in GT3 with CRS Racing, I found them to be a very professional team and we developed a great partnership. It's fantastic to be able to stay with them this year and to be given the opportunity to move up to the GT2 class on a permanent basis. My plan is to do the best possible job for the team."
Oak Racing have confirmed to Endurance-Info that they will switch to Judd engines for 2010 from AER. The catch is that they will still carry Mazda France sponsorship, despite the AER engine being badged as a Mazda. The logic to the decision comes to relability - the AER proved to be less than a reliable engine.
Rumours have emerged that SuperGT driver Benoît Tréluyer could be on his way to an Audi works drive in place of Alex Prémat. We are also hearing that Tokai University have put in an entry submission to Le Mans. More on these as info comes to hand
Darren Turner has been confirmed as a driver with the Young Driver AMR team for the 2010 FIA GT1 World Championship.
I'm really excited to be doing the full FIA GT1 World Championship," he said. "Not only because we will be visiting some fantastic circuits but also because the level of competition will make it an intense and enjoyable season. I'm looking forward to working with the Young Driver AMR team. After visiting the team's base in Paderborn (Germany) last week I can see that they have the infrastructure and resources to achieve great success."
Before we start - I will just mention that we are Grand Am fans but in a spectacular display of creative PR, Grand Am released a press release to say that their telecast of live or highlighted material from Daytona will reach 280 million households worldwide. While this may be technically true, we here tend not to give any credit to stats such as this. A bit like the Australian V8 Supercar telling the Queensland Government that their races were broadcast to a hundred and something countries. It turned out they could only verify how the broadcasts were being shown in a handful of countries. After the Government shelled out a lot of cash, they weren't very happy. So given this history, and the amount of empty seats at Daytona, this wins laughable release of the day.
Sam Tickell
