STUNNING RETURN TO RACING AFTER MID YEAR BREAK!
Ben Tuck’s busy 2025 season has resumed after a summer break with a win in GT World Challenge, a podium and a fastest lap in the European Le Mans Series and a dominating performance in the FIA World Endurance Championship. This superb run of form continues Ben’s highly successful first half of the 2025 season and brings his season tally to three wins, five podiums, three top five finishes and two fastest laps. Across four championships, Ben has never finished outside of the top ten so far, aside from technical retirements. These most recent trio of races kicks off an equally busy second half of the season and forms the opening part of six back-to-back races across three continents in all four championships in which he is competing.
Ben Tuck’s summer break ended when he rejoined his Kessel Racing Car Guys crew of Takeshi Kamura and James Calado at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium in August for the European Le Mans Series Round 4. The team arrived determined to recover from a race ending crash at Round 3 in Imola earlier in the year having shown strong promise with two podiums so far.
Bronze rated Takeshi Kamura qualified their bright yellow #57 Ferrari in seventh position and he and Ferrari factory driver James Calado completed their race stints to deliver the car in sixth position for Tuck to complete the final 1 hour and 10 minutes of the race. Tuck immediately hit the track hard, reeling in the cars ahead and going on to claim outright fastest and fastest average GT3 lap times. Based upon his blistering pace, he elected to gamble on an early stop for fresh tyres anticipating later stops for his competitors, a strategy that was activated beautifully as Ben’s lap times propelled him up the order from sixth to third in a superbly executed podium finish for the crew of the #57 Ferrari.
Just a week later, Ben Tuck was on the other side of the Ardennes, in the Eiffel for Round 4 of GT World Challenge Europe at Nurburgring with Team WRT and Al Manar Racing and teammates Al Faisal Al Zubair and Jens Klingman. The crew of the #777 BMW had already notched up a win in the Dubai 24 Hours and followed up with a win, a podium and a top five finish in the proceeding rounds of the Gold class of GT World Challenge Europe. In an impressive all-round performance, the crew went on to claim another victory in the Gold class and 14th overall in a field of 61 cars at Nurburgring. The race marked a triumphant return for Ben to Nurburgring after racing in the NLS Championship between 2019 and 2022.
Another week and another continent beckoned, when Ben made his debut just a few days later at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) for the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) 6-hour Lone Star Le Mans race with Ford Performance and Proton Competition in the #77 Ford Mustang GT3 with regular WEC crew, Bernado Sousa and Ford driver Ben Barker. Ford dominated the meeting with Ben exchanging pole position lap times with the sister Ford Mustang in GT3 Hyperpole to record the first ever Ford front row lockout in WEC. Race day was hampered by very poor weather and a delayed start under the safety car. But once underway from second place on the grid the #77 crew went on to completely dominate the GT3 race, leading for 72 of the 115 laps run, Tuck himself leading the race for his entire stint.
As the weather started to dry, the track surface began to deliver an advantage to those cars who elected to gamble on dry weather slick tyres in the final stages of the race, and in the last four agonising laps their Mustang went from the lead to sixth position.
Ben has demonstrated his consistency and pace in different cars, against different opposition and in widely varying weather conditions over the last three weeks and has laid down a marker for the rest of his season which continues with back-to-back races in the European Le Mans Series at Silverstone, UK, IMSA at Indianapolis, USA and in the FIA World Endurance Championship at Fuji, Japan.
