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Photo: Gruppe C Photography/BMW Connor De Phillippi says a top-five overall finish for the unique BMW M3 Touring 24H in the Nürburgring 24 would be a “dream weekend” for the program that started as an April’s Fools joke just over a year ago. The 2017 N24 winner has teamed up with his IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship co-driver, and fellow American, Neil Verhagen, plus Ugo de Wilde and Jens Klingmann in the unique racer based on the BMW M4 GT3 EVO. BMW first flirted with the idea of taking an estate/wagon car to the Nordschleife with a post on April 1, 2025, but then made it a reality when the green light was given. “We kind of got some sniffs of it at the end of last year,” De Phillippi told Sportscar365. “We were told we’re going to drive it in January. When we found out we were going to do it, we were over the moon about it. “It’s obviously a very, very special car and program and the fact that they built it and did ...

Photo: SRO Japan Cup Sena Sakaguchi says he has “high expectations” for the opening round of the SRO Japan Cup season this weekend at Sportsland Sugo as he prepares to give K-tunes Racing’s new Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R its race debut. The Toyota SUPER GT regular will share the No. 96 Corvette with Bronze-rated Kazunori Suenaga in what will mark the Z06 GT3.R’s first event in the hands of a Japanese team. Sakaguchi will contest this week’s opener as well as the final round at Suzuka in September, with Nirei Fukuzumi — otherwise engaged as part of KCMG’s Nürburgring 24 effort this week — taking over the Fuji and Okayama rounds. Sugo will mark Sakaguchi’s first appearance in SRO competition, although he has GT3 experience from three seasons in SUPER GT’s GT300 class with the Okayama Toyopet-owned K-tunes squad and two outings in Super Taikyu last year. Based on his first impressions of the Corvette from a shakedown held a...

Photo: Gruppe C Photography/SRO Maro Engel is aiming to return Mercedes-AMG to the top step of the Nürburgring 24 podium, ten years after his and the brand’s last victory in the Eifel endurance classic. The German manufacturer hasn’t won the event since 2016, when it locked-out the top four with its then-new Mercedes-AMG GT3s and Engel was part of the driver crew in the winning No. 4 machine. Engel narrowly missed out on victory in 2018 and finished third in 2022, but has failed to finish the last three races, at the wheel of GetSpeed-entered Mercedes-AMGs. “The hunger to win the race has always been there, it’s always been a very special race for me,” he told Sportscar365. “Personally, we had a few good chances. We came close in 2018, but it just hasn’t clicked in the previous nine years, so hopefully we can make it lucky tenth.” The veteran Mercedes-AMG factory driver will race the No. 80 Mercedes-AMG Team Ravenol entry alongside Luca Stolz, Fabi...

Photo: Toyota Miki Koyama believes that back-to-back podiums in the opening rounds of the SUPER GT season demonstrates the “progress” she has made as part of the apr Lexus squad. Toyota junior driver Koyama, sharing the No. 31 Lexus LC500h GT with Kazuto Kotaka, finished third in last month’s Okayama curtain-raiser and backed that up with the same result in last week’s three-hour Golden Week fixture at Fuji Speedway, where she and Koyama were joined in the cockpit by rookie Charlie Wurz. In the process, she became SUPER GT’s first female driver to score multiple top-three finishes, beating one-time podium finishers June Okanoya and Lilou Wadoux. The strong start to the season for the apr team contrasts to 2025, when Koyama struggled alongside Oliver Rasmussen, failing to score a top-ten finish all year. While Koyama described her run to third in Okayama as “frustrating” owing to the fact she couldn’t clear the Inging Toyota GR86 GT du...

Source: Sports Car 365

Photo: Porsche Carrera Cup Asia Porsche junior driver Marcus Amand holds a strong lead in the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia title race at the halfway stage after securing his second and third victories of the season in last weekend’s third round at Fuji Speedway. The 20-year-old Franco-Finnish driver, took a clean sweep of wins aboard his Phantom Global Racing-prepared No. 3 car at the iconic Japanese venue to extend his points lead, adding to his triumph in the opening race of the Zhuhai round in April. It has put Amand 37.5 points clear of Phantom Global stablemate Rodrigo Dias Almeida, who has scored three podiums from the opening six races and scored maximum points in the second Zhuhai race, second on the road behind stand-in Alexander Tauscher. The season began at Shanghai in March, when Carrera Cup Asia became the first series worldwide to debut the all-new Type-992.2 Porsche 911 Cup car, with the wins being shared by Naquib Azlan (EBM) and another guest driver, Luo Kailuo. ...

Source: Sports Car 365