A Photo Finish Built on Chaos at Misano Adriatico
One-tenth of a second separated the winner from the runner-up in the opening round of the 2020 Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe season at Misano Adriatico. That margin alone would make a decent headline. What makes Target Racing’s victory for Miloš Pavlović and Raul Guzman worth dissecting is everything that produced it: a drivethrough penalty for the early leader, a pit-stop infringement for the eventual winners themselves, strategic gambles that reshuffled the order mid-race, and lapped traffic that decided the podium in the final two corners. A 50-minute customer race became a concentrated argument for why spec-car competition, when the machinery is equal, can deliver drama that outstrips its billing.
Pavlović, the 2014 Series champion returning to Super Trofeo competition for the first time since 2018, found himself battling not just Imperiale Racing’s Vito Postiglione and Kikko Galbiati for the win, but also a pair of backmarkers who nearly handed the race away from him on the final lap. The lead changed hands three times in the closing minutes, and the result was settled on the exit of the last meaningful braking zone.
How Penalties and Pit Strategy Rewrote the Running Order
The race began conventionally enough. Liberati jumped the pole-sitting Leipert Motorsport car of Sebastian Balthasar into Turn 1 and quickly built a gap of more than three seconds. Then a drivethrough penalty for a start infringement wiped out his advantage entirely, dropping Liberati and Finnish co-driver Olli Kangas to a 13th-place recovery drive.
With Liberati removed from the equation, the pit window became the decisive battleground. Balthasar stopped early, handing over to co-driver Påverud. Oregon Team’s Dorian Boccolacci played the opposite strategy, running a series of quick laps and pitting at the very end of the 10-minute window before Kevin Gilardoni took over the #11 car. That approach kept Oregon Team nominally in front, but Påverud was closing.
Guzman, who started sixth and slipped to eighth before Liberati’s penalty reshuffled things, pitted from seventh. When Pavlović emerged from the pit lane, the #9 Target car sat third and within striking distance of the leaders, despite carrying a 0.345-second penalty for a pit-stop infringement of its own. Two penalties in one race for the eventual winners. That detail alone separates a routine result from a story worth telling.
Gilardoni defended hard, but Påverud executed a committed dive down the inside of Turn 8 to seize the lead, with Pavlović following through into second shortly after. For a few laps, Påverud looked comfortable. The chaos was still coming.
Backmarkers Decide the Win on the Final Lap
Påverud’s race unraveled at Turn 14, a right-hand hairpin where he caught a backmarker at the worst possible moment. Before he could recover his momentum, another lapped car blocked him again at Turn 15. Both Pavlović and Galbiati swept past, dropping Påverud from first to third in the space of two corners.
The cruelty of lapped traffic cut both ways. Pavlović himself got baulked by a backmarker at Turn 15 on the following lap, briefly handing Galbiati the lead with one lap remaining. But Pavlović managed to reclaim the position on the exit, and from there he held on. The final gap: just over a tenth of a second. In a one-make series where every car runs the same naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10, margins that small come down to the driver’s hands and a dose of circumstance.
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO‘s role is to equalize the machinery and let driver skill, team strategy, and sheer luck decide the outcome. Misano delivered on that premise with almost theatrical precision, the kind of finish that justifies the entire concept of spec-car racing.
Basz’s Charge and the Class Battles Worth Watching
The Pro class result dominated the headlines, but the standout individual drive came from Pro-Am. Andrzej Lewandowski and Karol Basz qualified 16th, ran second in class during the opening stint, and then Basz took over and carved his way through the field. The all-Polish pairing finished fourth overall, 12 positions better than where they started, only seven seconds behind the race winners. Basz’s overtaking sequence through slower traffic and faster-class competitors alike was the kind of stint that earns a driver attention from teams further up the grid. Gerard van der Horst and Loris Spinelli of Van Der Horst Motorsport worked their way into the top 10 for second in Pro-Am, underlining the depth of competition across classes.
The Am category mirrored the Pro class in one telling respect: penalties decided the winner. Massimo Mantovani started from Am pole and led the early running before a drivethrough penalty handed victory to Cedric Leimer and Laurent Jenny of Autovitesse. Claude-Yves Gosselin and Giuseppe Fascicolo completed the Am podium for Boutsen Ginion. In the Lamborghini Cup class, Kurt Wagner and Libor Dvoracek took the win ahead of Hans Fabri and Konrad Motorsport’s Martin Lechman.
Across four classes, three of the four category battles were directly shaped by penalties. The stewards earned their fees at Misano, and the pattern reinforced the broader story of the evening: in a series built on mechanical parity, the human element, whether brilliance or error, determines everything.
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO and Why Parity Produces This Kind of Racing
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO is a track-only, rear-wheel-drive race car built around a hybrid carbon fiber and aluminum chassis, powered by a naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10. Weight reduction through carbon fiber and aluminum keeps the car light enough that driver inputs and setup choices matter more than raw power advantages, because no power advantages exist. Every car on the grid runs the same engine, the same aerodynamic package, and the same fundamental architecture.
That parity is the entire point, and Misano illustrated why it works. The Super Trofeo series, inaugurated in 2009 with the Gallardo and running continuously since, functions as Lamborghini’s primary customer racing program. It occupies a specific niche below GT3 competition: accessible enough for gentleman drivers in the Am and Lamborghini Cup classes, competitive enough for professionals like Pavlović and Basz to demonstrate real skill separation. The 50-minute race format with a mandatory driver change and pit window is exactly the structure that created the strategic complexity on display at Misano, the same structure that turned a tenth-of-a-second gap into the product of penalties, pit timing, traffic, and raw pace rather than any mechanical advantage.
Five Rounds Remain: What Misano Signals for the Season
The 2020 Super Trofeo Europe calendar runs five rounds after Misano: Nürburgring in September, Barcelona and Spa-Francorchamps in October, and Circuit Paul Ricard in November. A compressed schedule, shaped by the realities of the 2020 season, that leaves little room for teams to regroup between events.
Pavlović’s return to the series after a two-year absence, combined with a victory on his first race back, immediately establishes Target Racing as the team to watch in the Pro class. But the margins at Misano were so thin, and the influence of penalties so decisive, that predicting a championship favorite from one race would be reckless. What the opener did establish is that the 2020 field is closely matched enough to produce genuine uncertainty at every round. Race 2 at Misano followed on Sunday afternoon, with the rest of the season promising more of the same tight competition that made this opener worth watching. If the remaining five rounds deliver anything close to what Misano produced, the 2020 Super Trofeo Europe season will be remembered for far more than its compressed calendar.
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