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Press Members
Paraplegic racer Bailly to race specially modified Bentley for CMR 26 January 2022
Mercedes-AMG squad AKKA ASP names first set of drivers for 2022 25 January 2022
Ledogar joins Dinamic Porsche crew alongside Bachler and Cairoli 25 January 2022
Sophie Peyrat joins TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa team as Event Director 17 January 2022
Valentino Rossi commits to full-season Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe Powered by AWS campaign with Team WRT Audi 13 January 2022
Team WRT and Vanthoor recognised with top RACB awards 6 January 2022
The longest day of the year // 2021 TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa 8 August 2021
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The 2021 TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa in facts and figures
The 2021 TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa saw the race return to its traditional summer slot and delivered one of the most memorable finishes in the event's long history.
For many, the abiding memory will be Alessandro Pier Guidi's dramatic late pass on Dries Vanthoor, which gave the Iron Lynx squad victory and ensured that Ferrari returned to the top step of the podium for the first time in 17 years.
But there was far more to this year's race than the spectacle that played out during the final hour. Each edition of the TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa produces a vast amount of stories and statistics, both good and bad, that make the event what it is. These are just some of the numbers worth remembering from 2021.
1 – By taking overall victory and a one-two finish in Pro-Am, Ferrari was the best performing brand at this year's race. This ensured that the Italian marque took home the Coupe du Roi, which is awarded to the manufacturer that scores the best results across all classes.
2 – AKKA ASP ace Raffaele Marciello took pole position for the second year in succession, which also secured Mercedes-AMG its third in a row. No brand has achieved four straight poles during the GT era.
3 – Only the top-three finishers took the chequered flag on the lead lap at this year's race, compared with a record-setting eight in 2020. The last time that fewer than three cars came home on the lead lap was 2015, when the winning BMW lapped the entire field.
4 – A record four Silver Cup crews secured a spot in Super Pole at this year's TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa. Ricardo Feller ensured that Emil Frey Racing earned class pole, putting the #14 Lamborghini fourth on the final grid.
5 – After a lean spell by its own high standards, AF Corse returned to the top in Pro-Am this year. The #53 Ferrari of Cameron/Griffin/Mastronardi/Molina gave the Italian squad its fifth victory in the class and a first since 2015, while the sister #52 car ensured a one-two finish.
7 – McLaren achieved its best-ever result at the TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa by finishing seventh overall. The #38 JOTA crew of Bell/Barnicoat/Wilkinson qualified sixth and remained among the top-10 throughout the race to set a new benchmark for the British marque.
8 – Lamborghini matched its best finish as the #63 Orange1 FFF Racing entry came home one spot behind the McLaren in eighth, though this was a bittersweet result. The crew of Bortolotti/Caldarelli/Mapelli may have been the fastest this year, but its challenge was blunted by two pit speeding penalties, a puncture and late technical problems.
10 – Audi Sport secured its 10th visit to the podium since GT3 rules were introduced in 2011 thanks to the #32 Team WRT entry. Indeed, the German brand's 'worst' result of the past decade is fourth overall in 2019.
12 – Marc Basseng scored his second class victory in the Ardennes 12 years after the first. The experienced German driver was part of the Hägeli by T2 Racing squad that took Am Cup honours with its Porsche.
15 – This was the 15th edition for which TotalEnergies acted as title sponsor, as well as the first since the multi-energy company adopted its new name and visual identity. First joining as a partner at the end of the nineties, TotalEnergies remained with the event through the switch to GT rules in 2001 and stepped up to the role of title sponsor in 2007.
17 – Iron Lynx ended a 17-year gap between victories for Ferrari, earning the Maranello marque its fourth overall triumph in the Ardennes. Ferrari's previous wins came in 1949, 1953 and 2004.
19 – Two members of the 2021 grid can trace their TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa history back 19 years to the 2002 edition. In both cases, they represent the same brand now as they did back then: Romain Dumas still drives for Porsche, while Andrea Bertolini remains with Ferrari.
20 – This year's TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa marked the 20th race for the Intercontinental GT Challenge Powered by Pirelli, which launched at the Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12 Hour in 2016. The Belgian endurance classic has been ever-present on the calendar and opened the 2021 season.
35 – BMW said goodbye to its successful M6 GT3 model this year. The car won overall in 2016 and 2018, but there was no fairytale ending as both factory-supported cars hit trouble. The best M6 was the #10 Boutsen Ginion Racing entry, which came home 35th overall. This marked the second year in succession that the Belgian squad was BMW's best finisher at Spa.
47 – Only one car at this year's edition featured a trio of past winners: the #47 KCMG Porsche. Two of last year's victorious crew were present thanks to Laurens Vanthoor and Nick Tandy. They were joined by 2016 winner Maxime Martin, who raced a Porsche at Spa for the first time since 2006.
52 – After a disastrous qualifying for its #32 entry, Audi Sport Team WRT produced a stunning comeback. The crew of Vanthoor/Weerts/Van der Linde made up 52 places to secure a runner-up finish, only losing the lead 10 minutes from the chequered flag.
59 – Aston Martin earned a long-awaited return to the overall podium this year thanks to a sublime performance from partner squad Garage 59, which added a one-off Pro entry for the event. The crew of Thiim/Sørensen/Gunn were faultless on their way to third overall, matching the result scored by Gigawave Motorsport in 2008.
73 – This year's edition was the 73rd running of the TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa since its creation in 1924. By starting on 31 July and concluding on 1 August, it was the first instance of the race crossing between months since 2010.
201 – A total of 201 drivers from 33 nations competed in this year's TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa. Germany was the best represented with 36 entrants, followed by Italy (26), France and the United Kingdom (both 22). There were 11 nations with a single driver in the field, including Chile, Estonia and Zimbabwe.
556 – With relatively little rain and long spells of green flag conditions, the 2021 race ran for a total of 556 laps. This resulted in a distance of 3,894.22 kilometres, making this the 'longest' 24 Hours since 2013.
Next year's edition of the TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa will take place on 28–31 July. As ever, the event will be preceded by two days of official testing at the Belgian venue, which are scheduled for 21-22 June.
Entry List - TotalEnergies 24 Hours of Spa
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There are two kinds of stand at Art Fairs: those dedicated to a single artist and those showcasing a gallery's stable as a whole. The former are best for discovering new voices, for which it is hard to get an adequate feel from one or two works. The latter, by showing a wide range, are more useful for picking up on the latest development in the work of a familiar artist. Here are nine such which I liked.
Following on from early works which included texts dealing with AIDS issues, American artist Donald Moffett has worked in the rare genre of politically engaged abstraction, integrating gay politics into paintings on drilled wooden panels with holes and zips in which reference both Fontana's piercing of the canvas and fetishistic clothing. Marianne Boesky's elegant booth was dedicated to a new suite of nine paintings which use more traditional materials to elegiac ends: they take off from Walt Whitman's account of dressing the wounded in the Civil War, and what looks like some kind of fur turns out to be made from tenderly extruded oil paint.
A charming video from the Brazilian artist best known for her hypnotizing film of leafcutter ants transporting coloured confetti: she exploits the match between a parrot and the Brazilian football colours by combining the bird with the sound of a typically breathless football commentary in the exaggeratedly excited national style. That allows for no pauses, and it seems the parrot is eating the punctuation made redundant in that peculiar language game.
Gary Hume has previous in applying his trademark household gloss style to birds, but they have been European and often babies. His latest paintings blow up near-abstract close-ups of a bird of paradise to a vast scale to maximize the colour and joy. Escapist? Maybe – and whether anti-recessional or not, tropical birds seem to be in fashion. One could add to Neuenschwander and Hume an enormous toucan photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans and a fictional Bird of Paradise by Ryan Gander, or could wander out to Paradise Row's new space to see Shezad Dawood put parrots through hoops of neon.
The New York-based Canadian Marcel Dzama created his distinctive world of violence and dream in the 1990s through an addictive stream of watercolours, using root beer for the brown which has remained his most characteristic colour. Over the past decade he has expanded his characters' reach through sculptures, dioramas, collage and film as well as paintings. Now we have a mannequin which rotates on its ceiling fan engine base, complete with costume, mask and gun. This spinning woman – one of the Revolution Dancers who do battle with ghost soldiers in Dzamaland – conflates the military and the balletic to mysterious effect.
The Scottish artist Callum Innes has established a practice which is as much about unpainting as about painting. He has recently moved from a characteristic colour format which bisects the canvas and then halves one of halves by bleeding away the colour with turpentine, to one of two halves. That makes the removal less obvious – in fact, the story of the paintings is only fully visible from the side. Many layers of gesso are applied before a layer of black. That black is washed away from one half to expose the white beneath, and the other half is painted a different colour: white in the example shown, but the Ingelby Gallery also has black, the Kerlin Gallery green and the Frith Street Gallery purple. At the central boundary of the two halves a black borderline remains.
It's not new for Wearing to show herself wearing the cast of another person in which it's only her deep brown eyes which are 'really her': such photos have included herself as her father and brother. But this move into celebrity territory, and the need for a body cast showing 'her' flesh, are new. The self-portrait isn't just in the eyes, but in the tribute to her influences of Warhol and behind him, Marcel Duchamp, whom Warhol was imitating in turn by dressing in drag in the top half of this image. The lower half is based on Richard Avedon's famous shot of Warhol revealing his scars following Valerie Solanas' attack in 1968.
Thomas Bayrle (born Berlin, 1937) has previously used the elements here – cars, engines and the rosary. He has often used traffic and roads as stand-ins for the overall systems which control us, and has drawn parallels between the church and industrialisation as the historical drivers behind modernity. That all plays into this new kinetic combination, in which one could just make out the German mutter of 'Bitt für Uns' beyond the Fair's background hum as the windshield blades, denied their window, made a vain effort to cleanŠ the wall, the fair, the sins of its attendees, the world of art, the world?
The imaginative US-Cuban partnership of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla has operated since 1995. They were right on the topical money with this abandoned petrol pump which appears to have reversed the process of oil extraction in turning back to a fossil-filled limestone. Perhaps they're already envisaging the time when the world has moved on from oil – though there's no telling whether this tableau is from a bright new carbon-free future which makes such pumps redundant, or an apocalyptic end of times which has rendered them customerless.
New Zealand's representative at last year's Venice Biennale has made an ongoing series of figures with a hand-drawn wobbliness in hippyish tie-died hues which seem to combine an unidentifiable number of ethnographic references. For her recent show at the Vienna Secession, Upritchard added a harlequin patterning inspired by its Gustav Klimt frieze and built a matching set of hand-painted oak drawers on which the figure stands. It contains various arty surprises, as does the whole of Kate MacGarry's stand, much of which is secreted inside a larger cabinet designed by Martin Gamper.