The 24 Hours of Spa remains the only Blancpain Endurance Series race that Shane van Gisbergen hasn’t won as his second year in the category comes to a close.
Garage 59’s #58 McLaren that the Kiwi shared with Rob Bell and Come Ledogar limped home 31st in the 2016 edition of the Belgian classic after a drama-filled weekend.
Van Gisbergen blitzed the field in qualifying on Thursday night before an oil pressure issue saw him forced to abandon his Superpole effort.
Another blow struck early in the race as the timing of a lengthy Safety Car saw the #58 entry become one of several front-runners to be trapped a lap down.
The car remained in contention during the night until Ledogar clashed with a lapped Lamborghini just prior to half distance.
Van Gisbergen had been sleeping in the team’s trackside motorhome when his car’s race defining incident occurred.
“I got woken up in a rush to come out and jump in,” van Gisbergen told Speedcafe.com.
“I got my suit on real quick and when I came out the car was in the box getting a new front-bumper.
“That was the first I knew of it. They fixed it and I went back out.
“We lost all the floor and everything, so it lost a heap of downforce. All the alignment was straight but it had no grip.
“24 hour races are very, very tough. We had a good opportunity to do well, the car was pretty good and quite solid but it slipped away.”
The McLaren lost further laps with a series of issues in the second half of the race, including a brief fire caused by a faulty gearbox solenoid in the closing stages.
While the McLaren never looked as competitive in the race as it had in qualifying, Van Gisbergen said that he wasn’t conserving the car following Friday’s reliability scare.
“I think everyone just turns it up,” he said of the pace of the race, which ended with German manufacturers BMW, Mercedes and Audi sweeping the podium.
“The Audi did a lap within 0.2s of its qualifying pace on full tanks. That tells you a lot right there.
“But we don’t do that stuff, we play it straight here. We put it all on the table on Thursday.
“We were flat out in the race too, but not quite as fast.”
This year’s Blancpain Endurance Series finale at the Nurburgring clashes with the Sandown 500, meaning Van Gisbergen’s second season with Garage 59 is at an end.
Van Gisbergen checks out of the series at the top of the points standings, sharing the lead with Bell and Ledogar.
In two years the Kiwi has won four races from eight starts, tasting success at Silverstone, the Nurburgring, Monza and Paul Ricard.
The 27-year-old says he must first wait for the new Supercars calendar before deciding on whether he wants to return in 2017.
“There’s five races on the calendar and we’ve won all but this one (Spa) so it would be good to come back and do that,” he said.
“It’s a pretty awesome race but we’ll see what happens next year with the calendar.
“Supercars is the priority and the last two years we’ve been lucky to only have one conflict.
“The Supercars calendar is every second week at the moment so it’s quite hard to fit everything in.
“If the calendar aligns we’ll see what happens.”
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