



Podzimní cena Brna (Autumn Prize of Brno) was part of International Championship of Czech Republic, Central European zone and maybe something else (too complicated). We at Racing Sports Cars attended the meeting as the best one in Brno in 2018, mainly because of the race of so called Division 4 and 5, for GT cars and Sports Prototypes. However by far the fastest race of the meeting was formula series called BOSS, which consisted of older Formula 1 and more recent Formula GP cars. Ingo Gerstl in Toro Rosso from 2009 is the men to beat. In Saturday, he made an artificial pit stop, to make the race more interesting, while in Sunday he ran just to keep the nearest competitors behind (Benetton F1 from 1997), only to set penultimate lap some 7 second quicker than any other and winning the race without doubts who was fastest. Already in qualifying, Ingo Gerstl was about 10 seconds quicker than any other car. In qualifying he ran one lap at 1:35.155 , which is more than 11 seconds quicker than the fastest Sauber-Mercedes during the Group C race in 1988, at the same configuration of the track.








Division 4 under 2000 cc for GT and touring cars was a battle between Lotus Exiges. Two of them had a close battle for a few laps, till the one driven by Petr Krejčí retired and the race became a dull circulation of Renault Clios, which formed the majority of the field. Two Lotuses were at the top, but no near any close battle. One Lotus was driven by extremely slow driver and other two were more or less a serial versions of the car, running deep in the field. Petr Mandelík won the Sunday's race with 70 second of advantage over the second Lotus, after only 11 laps.








Division 2 and 3 ran a race together for various Formula cars, mainly based on F3 machinery. It was good to follow a formula race which was not a one-make series/cup boring exhibition of same cars. But still we were awaiting the main sports car race, sprint for GT over 2000 cc and Sports Prototypes. Unfortunately, several cars crashed seriously in the Saturday Sprint, so we lost about 3 GT3 and one of only two open top spiders, a Norma 2000 cc of Janík Motorsport. The team also entered faster of the two present LMP3 cars - the Norma, chassis number 10. Another LMP3 car, a Ligier JS P3, was entered by Horag (Hotz) Racing, chassis 35, but the car was slow in Saturday, and DNS on Sunday, since the driver did not feel well.








So only three prototypes took the grid on Sunday for the second sprint race. Benjamin Hotz driving a turbo-powered CN Ligier JS 53 started from pole (1:53) and led the race from the start to the finish. Factory Praga R1T driven by Aleš Jirásek was second during the entire race. The Norma LMP3 driven by slow Petr Lisa, could not manage to keep the third slow at the start when several Lamborghinis and an Audi overtook it due to better acceleration of the local iteration of the GT3/Cup cars. Lisa was never able to fight back his lost position and ended the race up at 7th position, despite being third fastest in qualifying.








The fastest GT car in Sunday's qualifying and the race was always an older Audi R8 LMS driven by Richard Chlad, jr., followed by three Lamborghini Huracan Trofeo. The rest of the field was formed by GT3 cars (BMW Z4 and Alpina B6, older and newer Audis), Cup Porsche 911 and several TCR cars. An extra BMW M3 E36 GTR was unsortable kind of a local silhouette. Unfortunately 10 cars stayed out of the action on Sunday, so we cannot bring you photos of them. They were DNS for number of reason. Nearly half of them were eliminated in a huge first turn accident in Saturday's sprint, while some went home due to a lot of commitments or felt unwell, such as the already mentioned LMP3 Ligier driver.








The weather was fine and sunny, the attendance was not bad for a local race but generally, considering what Brno Autodrom hosted in the past (ISRS, FIA GT, listed for the shortened ELMS 2012), it is really sad no real top level sports car races are held here anymore. Even the 24H Series and traditional Epilog endurance race was removed from the calendar. This was probably the best race car meeting of the year, so we opted to get there at least for Sunday.


















































