Brendon Leitch walked away with hard-fought sixth and eighth-place finishes in the latest GTC round at Hockenheim over the weekend.
The Leipert Motorsport driver was a guest for the weekend. He shared the team’s Lamborghini Huracan GT3 with Tyler Cooke.
The format for the weekend was three races. The first, known as the Goodyear 60, is a one-hour endurance race with a compulsory pitstop.
Leitch and Cooke shared duties for the race, with Leitch tasked with the opening stint.
Starting fifth, the Kiwi was up to fourth with a swift lap one manoeuvre.
He was re-overtaken by Salman Owega after a safety car restart but ran in the top-five until his pitstop with 25 minutes remaining.
Cooke rejoined the race in seventh and brought the car home in eighth.
The final two races were 30-minute sprints with no pitstops.
Cooke did race one and finished ninth.
Taking the driver’s seat for the weekend’s finale, Leitch lined up fifth on the grid.
He maintained position in the opening sequence of corners before Fabian Plentz ran off-road and into the dirt along the back straight just in front of Leitch.
Plentz returned to the circuit still in position but had lost plenty of momentum.
Leitch looked to capitalise on the situation and put a move up the inside of Plentz.
Plentz stayed ahead of Leitch, but the Kiwi did get past Owega in the process before the safety car was deployed for an incident further back.
Leitch ran in P4 after the safety car restart and held that position for most of the race.
However, he was slowly being caught by Owega and Markus Winkelhock.
Owega put up an opportunistic lunge on Leitch at the hairpin with 15 minutes on the clock but ran wide, giving the place back to Leitch.
The next chance came at turn two a few moments later, and Owega got ahead of Leitch. Winkelhock followed suit and Leitch was down to sixth.
Owega and Winkelhock squabbled over fourth all the way down the back straight, and Leitch was threatening to reclaim his lost positions.
Winkelhock threw up a move at turn eight and forced Owega to cover. However, Leitch had expertly placed himself to undercut the pair of them.
It looked to have been a perfectly executed manoeuvre, but Winkelhock shouldered a perhaps unsighted Leitch wide.
Winkelhock claimed P4, while Owega got back past Leitch.
The battle was enthralling and the highlight of the race.
While he was gutted not to beat his rivals, Leitch enjoyed being in the thick of the action.
“It was a lot of fun,” he said.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t quite have the speed to stay in the fight but a massive thank you to the team. It has been a great weekend and really looking forward to doing some more miles.”
Leitch is racing with Leipert in next year’s GT Challenge Europe Endurance cup, including a gig in the Spa 24 Hour race.
Watch Leitch’s sprint race replay below:
