Lights to flag Kyalami 9-Hour win for van der Linde and BMW

Saturday’s Kyalami 9-Hour was attended by a large crowd and despite watching a small field they went home happy.

BMW domination

The reason was South African driver Sheldon van der Linde who, alongside teammates Dries Vanthoor and Charles Weerts, won the race overall in the German WRT team’s BMW M4 GT3. The event was round two of this year’s Intercontinental GT Challenge.

Van der Linde, Vanthoor and Weerts finished 1.7 seconds clear of the WRT team’s second BMW M4, shared by Philipp Eng, Augusto Farfus and Maxime Martin.

Third, another 1.3 seconds behind, was the Tresor Attempto Audi R8 LMS crewed by Mattia Drudi, Ricardo Feller and Patric Niederhauser.

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The Tresor Attempto’s second Audi finished fourth overall in the hands of Alex Aka, Dennis Marschall and Markus Winkelhock.

They were followed by the SunEnergy1 team’s Mercedes-AMG GT3 shared by Kenny Habul, Jules Gounon and Yannick Mettler who, in the process, won the event’s Pro-Am class.

The result saw Habul and Gounon retain the year’s overall drivers championship lead by three points from van der Linde, Vanthoor and Weerts.

Meanwhile, BMW’s one-two now sees it tied with Mercedes-AMG at the top of the manufacturers’ standings.

How it happened

Driving first, van der Linde, who started from second, initially fell back to third at the start, but managed to claw his back to first after which the WRT BMW never relinquished the number one spot, closely followed by its sister car.

Their closest rival in terms of pace, the pole-sitting GruppeM Mercedes-AMG GT of Maro Engel, Mikael Grenier and Raffaele Marciello, lost first, second, third and sixth gears just after the halfway mark and dropped down the field.

The team made it to 70% distance in order to be classified and score IGTC points before effectively retiring.

As evening approached, it looked as though Audi might be able to challenge the BMWs, but as darkness fell, the M4s upped their pace and pulled clear again.

With less than 30 minutes to go, a full course yellow appeared after the locally entered Stradale Racing Mercedes-AMG GT, driven by Arnold Neveling at the time, got beached at the top of Leeukop.

He, however, managed to get going again and despite the field bunching up with Drudi appearing keen on splitting the BMW 1-2, the Audi’s team decision not to pit him under the safety car similar to the move taken by WRT, left him on older tyres and unable to mount a challenge as the race resumed.

The order therefore didn’t change and as the clock hit 22h00, van der Linde, who had taken over from Vanthoor with 90 minutes remaining, crossed the finish line to win in front of an ecstatic crowd.

Despite the off and a number of pit stop infringements, the Stradale AMG GT3 of Neveling, Charl Arangies and Clint Weston, finished eighth overall, one place off the classified but ultimately non-running at the finish GruppeM Mercedes-AMG GT3.

The finish finisher to complete the race was the was the MJR Motorsport Audi R8 LMS of Marius Jackson, Mo Mia and Kwanda Mokoena that spent a lengthy time to pits due to unconfirmed mechanical troubles.

The Kyalami Supercup for entries only contesting the opening hour was won by the NGK Pablo Clark Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 of Mikaeel Pitamber, who beat out the BigFoot Expressing version of Sun Moodley.

Next race

After the opening Bathurst 12-hour in Australia and the 9-Hour, the series now takes a prolonged hiatus before resuming at the end of June with the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps. The full calendar can be viewed here.