Grove targets Le Mans start

Stephen Grove is chasing a place on the 24 Hours of Le Mans starting grid next year in what he describes as the pinnacle of GT3 racing.

The Grove Racing team owner will race with son Brenton and Shell V-Power Racing Team Supercars driver, Anton De Pasquale, in the Spa 24 hours later this month.

It was the Spa campaign which he says prevented a shot at this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, but the Supercars team owner says he is still actively plotting a path back to the Circuit de la Sarthe.

“That’s the pinnacle for me, so if we can make it work, we’ll be back there in 2024, in a GT3 car,” Grove told Speedcafe, who explained that securing an entry is as much a challenge as the famous race itself.

“It’s such a sought-after race, it’s hard to get a drive there,” the Supercars team owner admits.

“There’s a couple of roads to getting there. If we can do the road to Le Mans through the Asian Series, yeah, that’s something that we might look at,” he said. “[And] We’re currently doing the SRO series in intercontinental, so there’s a connection there.

Grove is referring to the arrangement between the SRO Motorsports Group with  The Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) and Asian Le Mans Endurance Management (ALMEM) to grant a 24 Hours of Le Mans entry to the winner of the Asian Le Mans Series.

The winner of the Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe also earns a berth in the June endurance race.

Grove has raced at the Circuit de la Sarthe before, with an entry in the Porsche Carrera Cup support race in 2014, where he finished 11th.

In last weekend’s 100th anniversary Le Mans, Rodney Jane represented Australia in the same support race as Grove did in 2014, with Jane driving his Porsche 911 – which he used to pay homage to Bob Jane T-Mart backed 1984 Le Mans entry of Larry Perkins and Peter Brock  – to 34th in the 62-car field.

In this year’s 24-Hour race itself, Australian James Allen took an LMP2 Pro/Am class win alongside George Kurtz and Colin Braun in the #45 Algarve Pro Racing entry.

“We’ll continue to work through that and try and get an entry,” said Grove.  “If we can get an entry, we’ll do the race for sure.”