This weekend at the Total 24hrs of Spa Francorchamps, for the first time, two customer teams represented Lamborghini in the FIA-GT championship.

Slightly earlier than planned at the start of the season, ALL-INKL.COM Racing under the leadership of René Muennich, has arrived at its new workshop in Bautzen in Germany. From there the team is organising the FIA-GT race programme of the #7 Lamborghini Murciélago R-GT with a new infrastructure. A second Lamborghini Murciélago R-GT has also been in action at the Belgian track, raced by Gigawave HD Digital in association with Reiter Engineering who build the cars. The Essex, Great Britain based manufacturer of antenna and broadcasting systems wants to establish its own team in the FIA-GT Championship and therefore will be working together with Reiter Engineering. Gigawave HD Digital supplies among other things the broadcasting technology of this year’s onboard cameras in the FIA-GT Championship. This new technology makes it possible to broadcast pictures from inside the cars without the need for a helicopter as a relay station.

The two Lamborghini cars qualified well during the three official sessions, the nr 28 entry in sixth place and the nr 7 in twelfth, both mixing well with a GT1 field that included a string of front-running cars favoured for victory from Maserati, Aston Martin and Corvette.

Come race day yesterday, and after the 1600 hr local time start there were problems almost immediately for the nr 7 All-Inkl.com Lamborghini Murciélago with French sports car veteran Christophe Bouchut behind the wheel, who was sharing the Murciélago for the weekend with German duo Frank Stippler and Stefan Mücke During the first hour of the Total 24 Hours of Spa Bouchut went off into the barriers and the arrived in the pits with the car's bonnet off. "The accelerator stayed blocked down and I went into the barriers.  It took four laps for me to be pulled out, and I had to drive over the gravel again.  The front splitter is broken.  They are trying to fix it now.  But we didn’t have anything ready, so it will take a while.  But we also had a transmission problem, so we would have had to stop anyway, so they are working on that as well." Despite repairs the transmission problems persisted and the nr 7 All-Inkl.com Lamborghini Murcielago finally was eventually retired from the race with a broken driveshaft during the sixth hour have completed a total of 83 laps.
 

It was also a difficult beginning of the endurance race for the nr 28 Reiter Engineering Lamborghini Murciélago, with its all-Dutch crew of Jos Menten, Peter Kox and Jeroen Bleekemolen, and with the car painted in the Dutch national colour of orange for the occasion. Menten started the race and this car too suffered with drive shaft problems. Menten recalls: “I had a great start. I immediately got past Pedro, but we were fully aware that our top speed at the end of the straight was inferior to that of our immediate competitors”, the young Dutchman continued. “When Bert Longin tried to overtake me on the inside I obviously opened the door for him. But then things went wrong. I had only just reached the bus stop chicane when I couldn’t get any power on to the track. In fact one of the drive shafts had given up the ghost.”

“We’ve broken two drive shafts,” explained Hans Reiter. “One this morning during the warm up, and one at the beginning of the race, and I do not know why. We managed to change it on the other side of the pit lane. We will see whether we have solved the problem, if we have no more drive shaft problems in the next two hours, I think it will be ok”.

For safety reasons the Reiter Engineering pit crew replaced both drive shafts, but one hour later the problem reoccured: “The car’s set up was too low, whereby the pressure on the drive shafts was becoming too heavy. This was the reason for the drive shafts breaking. In fact this cost us 22 laps let’s just hope that we have now had our share of bad luck and that we can now bring this race to a positive ending," said Menten. Peter Kox took over and experienced no problems during his stint prior to handing on to Jeroen Bleekemolen.

The A1 GP-driver was well into a good stint until, just as in Silverstone, fate reappeared, with a problem arising from the emergency switch resulting in a further loss of time. When ‘Bleek’ entered the pitlane it was Menten’s turn to get behind the wheel again: “I was just completing my first lap when at the end of the Kemmel straight when a support for the rear wing loosened. Metal fatigue. Luckily the team were quick to react. A new support was fitted, but here again what with the emergency switch and the rear wing problems we lost a further seven laps.”

For the Kox, Menten and Bleekemolen trio a good result was now out of the question: “With such a backlog two safety-car periods are not going to help us. It’s now a question of finishing the race, hoping that we might gather a few points at the half-way mark”,  Menten commented around midnight. The Dutchmen were ranked in 28th place. At approximately 02:00 Menten once again got behind the wheel of the Lamborghini Murciélago R-GT: “During my stint I still managed to climb up into 23rd place, and finally everything seemed to be running perfectly. I came in for the scheduled driver change-over and Peter took off, only to be hampered by a drive shaft problem. All that Peter could do was to park the car on the side of the track. It was over and out. We all knew beforehand that it was going to be a difficult race.”