Tandy Porsche withdraws from Brands Blancpain round

The Farnbacher Racing Porsche due to be driven by Nick Tandy in this weekend's Blancpain Sprint Series round at Brands Hatch has been withdrawn after sustaining serious damage in practice.

Farnbacher's 911 GT3-R was crashed by Swiss driver Philipp Frommenwiler shortly after he took over from Porsche factory driver Tandy in first free practice. Frommenwiler lost control of the car on the exit of Stirlings and speared across the track into the barriers. The Porsche sustained front-end damage that will require it to be rejigged back at Farnbacher's workshops.

"The car is quite badly damaged underneath, which means there is nothing we can fix the splitter to," Team boss Horst Farnbacher explained. He said the team, the first to run a Porsche in the BSS, would return to the series at some point, however.

"We want to so some more races, but we don't know when we will be back," he explained.

The withdrawal of the Farnbacher car brings the entry for Brands Hatch's first major international sports car fixture since 1996 to 19 cars. The Reiter Engineering-run Blancpain Racing Lamborghini Gallardo FLII has been withdrawn because Marc Hayek is ill, while Fortec Motorsports is running only one Mercedes SLS AMG after a serious accident at round one of the championship at Nogaro in April.

Armaan Ebrahim and Miguel Toril, who were in different Fortec cars at Nogaro, are teaming up for Brands. Fortec is confident that it will be back to full strength at the next round of the series at Zandvoort in July.