Spa 24 Hours – How G3 Was Won
The Inside Story

While Eric van de Poele was busy cementing his place in motorsport history with his fifth overall Spa 24 Hours title, another team was doing its bit for national pride by claiming a 1-2 in the G3 class.

Spa-Francorchamps based Mühlner Motorsport is no stranger to success in the big race, with 2008 seeing its eighth class victory (and its third 1-2) and the fourth in the last five years. However, the level of the competition in the G3 class was at an all-time high this year, with 15 cars – making it the largest class in the race – fighting for the win. Up against the two Mühlner Porsches were four other 911 GT3 Cup S, five Ferrari 430s, a Viper, a Gallardo and a very rapid Ascari.

Just after four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the crew of #123 - Heinz-Joseph Bermes, Mark Thomas, Marc Basseng and Jean-Francois Hemroulle - were celebrating atop the podium and dsc caught up with the Canadian driver, Thomas, to find out what was required to take the laurels. 

“The #123 is my regular FIA GT3 car,” he began from his office in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he is a senior engineer for BP, “so I knew that it was a good package. Bernard (Mühlner) is a good strategist and we had reasonable expectations before the race began, but we also knew that we had nothing over the other Porsches and that it was going to be tough.

“I started the race and had no other aims than to get through the first few laps without incident; just needed to make sure that I got into a good rhythm and not damage the car.

“We knew that the #112 (AS Events) Ferrari was going to have good speed, but we also knew that Marc and Jean-Francois have good speed; the challenge was to not get drawn into a direct confrontation, but to stick to a 2:29/30 pace. We just wanted to get to the night time with the car in good shape, so we had to be disciplined. We felt that if we kept to a constant pace then we could win the race in the pits.”

From eighth at the end of the first hour, the #123 moved into the top three during the second and went no lower for the remainder of the race. Joining it in the top three for the first half of the race were the AS Events Ferrari, the Preci-Spark Ascari and the ProSpeed Competition Porsche. At the half-way point, the #112 Ferrari led the Mühlner Porsche by just 14 seconds.

“We single-stinted the tyres for the first five hours and then Jean-Francois did the first double stint. When the rain started, we talked about whether to stay on slicks or switch to wets,” inters not being an option for the G3 runners. “With both Marc and Jean-Francois having so much experience of driving the Nordschleife – where one half of the track can be wet while the other is bone dry – we decided to stay on slicks. Juppy (Heinz-Joseph Bermes) was not happy about driving in the night on slicks on a damp track, so we sent him off to get a good night's rest. His first stint was on Sunday morning and it allowed the rest of us to take a break.

“We had a few dramas during the night. I was tagged by a GT1 car at the double apex left-hander – he tagged my left rear and I went onto a run off area - but was able to drive out again after an easy 720. Later, on my first double stint, the front right tyre went flat and that cost us a minute as I limped it back to the pits.   

“The biggest scare was at midnight when third gear started to make a horrible noise – you could initially go into third and come out, but it was completely gone by 6am. After that it was a case of clutch up and clutch down to get from second to fourth, but from mid-morning on, we only used fourth, fifth and sixth gears – we had to bring as much speed as possible into the corners to ensure we could use fourth on the exit; which was as frustrating as hell at Les Combes, where we had to keep the pedal flat to the floor and get the torque to pull us out.”

Despite the gearbox problem, the #123 was leading the race by quite a distance heading towards mid-morning; but, in the 17th hour, the timing screens were showing “Car 123 out at Turn 10”. What had happened?

“Marc was in the car and admitted that he had simply made a mistake. He went head on into the tyre wall and it sounds like the tow hook at the front of the car got snagged. We thought it was all over, but he eventually managed to free it and brought the car back to the pits.

“The team had to fit a new front and decided to do a full pads change at the same time. When Marc went back out, he was straight away back into the 2:29s.”

This delay dropped the #123 behind the #124 sister car, with the gap from first to second being 100 seconds at the end of hour 17.

“Duncan Huisman had been in the #124 earlier in the morning, but when Robert Voorman took over we told Marc to push. He took back the lead and then set about building up a barrier. We didn’t lose it again after that.

“We were on slicks almost the whole race and only changed to wets once during the heaviest of the rain. Our lap times sucked, of course, but we didn’t waste any time with having to constantly change back and forth.”

So it was that the quartet took the flag, each with a very sore right hand as a result of the gearbox problem, but otherwise very happy. So how did Mark Thomas celebrate the victory?

“As soon as the press conference was over, I got in my car, drove three hours to Schiphol Airport and flew back to Aberdeen. I spent Sunday evening in the office!”