Olsen: Ford Effort ‘Starting to Show’ With Spa Podium

Photo: MPS Agency

Proton Competition’s Dennis Olsen believes the team’s podium finish in Saturday’s 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps proves the team’s effort is ‘starting to show’ after the pair of Ford Mustang GT3s finished second and fourth.

The Norwegian captured his first podium of the season aboard the No. 88 car, which he shared with Stefano Gattuso and Giammarco Levorato, while Bernardo Sousa, Ben Tuck and Ben Barker missed out on a top-three finish by just a second.

It marked the first podium for the Mustang in WEC since last year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans and also served as an upturn in form for the Blue Oval after a challenging start to the season.

Prior to Spa, each of the two Proton cars had each recorded a tenth-place finish, while the No. 77 sister machine retired from the Qatar 1812km.

“It’s a lot of people involved in this program,” Olsen told Sportscar365.

“You have Multimatic, you have Ford, you have Proton and it’s a lot of key people involved in this.

“There is a lot of effort going on in the background, a lot of development and to try to learn more about this car and to make steps.

“I’m proud of all the guys. I think all the hard work we have put in it starts to show now finally and I think we deserve that.

“Obviously we had a much better weekend. I think Imola already we showed quite a bit of progress.

“We had the pace, Stefano was running P4 but unfortunately a small mistake in a Full Course Yellow cost us the race. 

“We had a drive-through and came out with some crazy drivers and they took our splitter off with contact in Imola and that was basically the race over so we couldn’t show our performance.”

With the 6H Spa’s positioning on the calendar as the race prior to the blue riband Le Mans event, Olsen noted that a lot of Proton’s focus for this race was already on the French endurance classic, especially for newcomer Gattuso.

Although the Italian has four starts in the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa under his belt, he has not previously competed at Le Mans before.

“It’s going to be his first time and for us it’s like really making sure that Stefano is in the in the right mood, understanding the whole game of this championship and what his role is,” said Olsen.

“I think today is a really good example of the job he did. He did a faultless race, he managed to save energy and he did all the right things and that gave us the opportunity.”

The latter stages of the race featured a multi-brand battles as both Fords notably scrapped with the No. 78 Akkodis ASP Team Lexus RC F GT3 of Yuichi Nakayama and the No. 46 Team WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO driven by Kelvin van der Linde.

This peaked when Olsen, Barker and Van der Linde came to blows at La Source, heading into the corner three-wide with the resulting contact pushing Barker into the gravel.

“It was some chaos in the second last stint,” Olsen said.

“Absolutely, we had quite good pace. I had fresh tires then and managed to catch up to the Lexus and the BMW.

“Ben was coming fast behind me as well and got past the Lexus pretty quick but Kelvin didn’t want to let us have it easy.

“So we had a moment into Turn 1 where I went on the outside, tried to squeeze him, brake as late as I dared.

“Going through the corner, I saw on my [screen] in the center dash that I had arrows on both sides. So I had cars on both sides and I was like, ‘Oh, here I am, the cheese in the sandwich.’

“So it was pretty tough. There was a big contact. Unfortunately, my teammate went off, but there was no space.

“I was just in the middle trying to survive and we did. It was a tough fight and we managed to come out of it in front.”