Pace Without Reward for Porsche Teams in Buriram

It wasn’t the most fruitful weekend in terms of points for the Absolute Racing Porsche squad at the GT World Challenge Asia powered by AWS, held at Thailand’s Chang International Circuit. However, the team showed significant progress in pace throughout the event.

The #911 Absolute Racing Porsche 911 GT3 R, adorned in the iconic yellow-and-black B-Quik livery and driven by China’s Zhongwei Wang and France’s Patrick Pilet — making his return after missing the previous round — endured a challenging and ultimately disappointing weekend. Race 1 ended in disappointment for the #911 crew, who were running in podium contention in the Pro-Am class before a track limits penalty relegated them to ninth. Race 2 was even shorter-lived, as Pilet was unfortunately taken out in a first-lap incident, forcing an early retirement.

Meanwhile, after a rather disappointing qualifying session, Li Xuanyu and Daniel Lu Wenlong secured ninth place in the Silver-Am class in both races with the #321 Absolute Racing Porsche 911 GT3 R. While the results don’t reflect the team’s true potential, multiple penalties obscured what was otherwise a strong and improving performance.

The GT World Challenge Asia now shifts to Japan for the first of two rounds in the country, with Fuji Speedway hosting the next event from July 11 to 13.

"The results don’t reflect our true pace or the tremendous effort the team has put into improving the performance of our Porsche cars. There’s more to come, and we’re determined to come back stronger in the second half of the season."

"Overall it was a difficult event for us. We had positive expectations coming into the weekend but didn’t put it together in qualifying and left ourselves in a tough place for the races. The track limits were really tight, so it was hard to find maximum pace without risking penalties. We’ll look to bounce back at Fuji in the next round."

"The race pace was much better than at previous rounds, we made a lot of progress on the set-up, and were unlucky not to score points. A penalty in Race 1 dropped us down, and then Patrick was hit at Turn 1 today. Hopefully we can have a better qualifying in Fuji, which will give us a good chance to clinch a strong result."

"It was a disappointing event, we showed some good pace, especially in the first race, but overall it wasn’t our weekend. It was hard but we learned a lot, fixed some issues and improved throughout. We’ll keep our heads up and focus on the next one."