At Least The Food & Wines Were Good...
9 May 2025
Team Viking Ursus Capital continued their Fun Cup France campaign with an eight hour race at the Spa Francorchamps Circuit in the Belgian Ardennes.
Regular drivers Mark Holme and Colin Kingsnorth were joined by Nick Nunn, who previously raced with the team in the UK Fun Cup Championship. Nunn is due to share the car again later this season in the 25hrs race at Spa.
With the race also qualifying for the European and Belgian Championships, there were over 100 cars on the grid, with the Viking trio lining up 18th of the French contingent.
“Testing had been chaotic and in qualifying I didn’t really push for a time as we thought the grid was being drawn from a hat. We didn’t know it was qualifying times and were out on old tyres,” Holme explained.
The weekend soon went from bad to worse when start driver Kingsnorth was hit heavily in the rear as they arrived at the La Source Hairpin on the opening lap.
“The driver that hit him was very apologetic, but he had brake pad knock off and arrived at the corner flat out. Colin hurt his neck in the impact and it pushed him off into the gravel on the exit, causing a lot of damage,” Holme added.
During the lengthy recovery and repair they lost more than 10 laps before being able to rejoin.
They were 46th and last in the Championship after the first hour, but by the end of the fifth hour had made two places, before the weather intervened.
“Once we rejoined we were running at top 10 pace, but little chance of making more progress, and then heavy rain caused the race to be stopped and a result declared after six hours, two hours early,” he said.
They were finally classified 42nd, “but it had been a disaster from start to finish really, one of the worst weekends in my racing career. The positives though were our pace and that by the end of the weekend Nick was on the pace too despite not having raced for over two years. It was good company, good food and good wine though,” he concluded.