Rossi Confirms 24H Spa Return

Photo: JEP/SRO

Valentino Rossi is set to make his fourth consecutive appearance in the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, with the Italian confirming on Friday that he will be at the event despite significantly scaling back his GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS involvement.

Speaking at the pre-event press conference for the second round of the FIA World Endurance Championship at Imola, the nine-time motorcycle world champion told reporters that he intends to be on the grid for the Ardennes endurance classic at the end of June.

“I will race in Spa 24 because I like Spa,” Rossi said. “All the big names are there and I will race. I don’t know the lineup still, but yes, I will race it.”

It has currently not been publicly confirmed with which team Rossi will compete in the 24H Spa, although it should be noted that he has exclusively raced for Team WRT since he made his full-time switch to sports car racing in 2022.

Another Spa entry with WRT would require the Vincent Vosse-led squad to field an additional car, as it currently has three full-time entries in GTWC Europe Endurance Cup.

Its full season Pro car, piloted by Charles Weerts, Kelvin van der Linde and Ugo de Wilde, recently took victory in the six-hour Endurance Cup season opener at Paul Ricard.

When asked by Sportscar365 about the chances of WRT fielding an extra car at Spa, team principal Vosse replied:

“It’s a tough race, it’s a tough organization. You don’t decide to just do extra cars when you know that it’s two weeks after Le Mans and two weeks before before Brazil.

“So there is a lot of things going on. It’s not easy to build this. I would love to to be able to have more chances to win but everything is not finished yet.

“I will never say that there are no discussions because it will not be true. You know that I will always fight to have another strong car. But it’s not that easy.

“It’s something that I would love to do, but let’s see how we can organize ourselves.”

Question marks also remain about Rossi’s co-drivers for the event, which have also not yet been named.

Last year, he teamed up with Raffaele Marciello and Maxime Martin, although neither of them are available this year as the former is engaged with ROWE Racing while the latter has left BMW in favor of a move to Mercedes-AMG.

Furthermore, BMW factory drivers Jesse Krohn and Augusto Farfus also form part of ROWE’s full season lineup, while Jens Klingmann and Dan Harper are with Al Manar Racing by WRT and Paradine Competition, respectively.

However, BMW still has a number of works drivers that do not yet have confirmed programs for the 24H Spa.

Dries Vanthoor recently told Sportscar365 that he is aiming to still compete at Spa, despite his increased involvement with BMW’s factory LMDh program in both WEC and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Sheldon van der Linde, who has a similar program to Vanthoor this season and is also not part of a full season GTWC Europe program, told Sportscar365 at Imola that a 24H Spa program is “in the pipeline.”

“Nothing’s confirmed yet,” said Van der Linde. “I’d like to do Spa again.

“I really enjoy the GT3 side of things, also the racing I find extremely good. I really hope I’m there.

“It would be really nice if they maybe [enter] a third/fourth Pro car. I don’t know what the plans are yet but that would definitely be in the pipeline.”

John Dagys contributed to this report