The Ferrari F430 GT's extraordinary adventure in the FIA GT Championship ended with two cars on the podium at Zolder on Sunday. After conquering the Constructors’ and Teams’ titles at the French Paul Ricard circuit earlier this month with one race still to go and for the fourth year in a row, the AF Corse Team drivers' missed out on success in the Drivers’ standings by a whisker, while the BMS and CRS Racing teams gained the second and third place in the final race at the Belgian Zolder race track.

In the last two hours of the series - which, after 13 seasons, will be divided into two series in the coming year and changing its name (GT1 World Championship and GT2 Europe) - class victory went to Richard Westbrook with the Porsche 911 GT3 RSR, followed by the Ferraris driven by Paolo Ruberti and Matteo Malucelli (BMS Scuderia Italia) and Andrew Kirkaldy and Rob Bell (CRS Racing).

The two CRS Ferraris started the race from sixth and seventh on the grid, with Antonio Garcia in No.55 and Rob Bell in No.56. Bell got the jump on Garcia as the race went green and both drivers then settled into a very good race pace. Garcia was the first to stop, handing over to Tim Mullen after 45 minutes. Bell then pitted in No.56 and Andrew Kirkaldy took to the track. The race was looking good for CRS Racing at half-distance with both Kirkaldy and Mullen on maximum attack. After making light work of passing another Ferrari, Mullen was chasing down a Porsche when he radioed in to say his water temperatures were rapidly rising.  

“I had a bit of contact with another car and that loosened my door,” said Mullen. “I had to keep trying to close it as I went along the straights, which I managed to do eventually but it knocked me out of my rhythm a bit. I then caught a Porsche but as we went through the first chicane I was unsighted and clobbered the kerb.” Unfortunately the kerb damaged his radiator and all he could do was come back to the pits and retire.

At this point in the race there was an information blackout when the timing screens froze and then went off completely. Kirkaldy in the meantime was pressing on and running very strongly in second place. After the final run of pit-stops Bell was back in the car and running in third place behind Westbrook’s Porsche and Ruberti’s Ferrari. The positions held until the end of the race so Bell and Kirkaldy took their third podium finish of the season. “It has been a very hard season for us for many reasons,” said Bell in the post-race press conference. “This was actually a very quiet race for us. We started well, passed a few cars and rounded the season off the season on a high so we can’t really ask for more than that.”

Andrew Kirkaldy continued: “The pit crew did a great job today and our strategy worked very well.  Porsche were very clever this weekend with their ‘getting rid of weight’ strategy so we were pretty handicapped from that perspective. In spite of all that we were almost in contention for the win. If the race had gone on any longer who knows what might have happened?" Meanwhile there was just a fourth place finish to show for the F430 GT driven by the previous champion Toni Vilander for the AF Corse team, slowed down by 100 kg of ballast and forced to an additional pit stop to change his car’s tyres.