A Victory Won in the Stewards’ Room
James Pull and Kelvin Snoeks crossed the line at Spa-Francorchamps believing they had finished second. They left Belgium with their first Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe victory, courtesy of a 10-second post-race penalty that reshuffled the entire PRO class podium.
The Bonaldi Motorsport duo inherited the win after stewards penalized the Antonelli Motorsport pairing of Daniel Zampieri and Giacomo Altoè for an irregularity during their restart following the mandatory pit stop. Zampieri had built an eight-second lead during his opening stint, handing the car to Altoè with what looked like a comfortable margin. Altoè then defended through a safety car period and sprinted to the flag, only for the penalty to drop them to third in class. That promoted Pull and Snoeks to the top step and elevated the Antonelli sister car of Kikko Galbiati and Joffrey De Narda to second in PRO and third overall.
For Pull, a proven winner across Super Trofeo regional series including the Middle East championship, the result cements his standing within Lamborghini’s motorsport ecosystem. More broadly, a stewards’ decision determining the race winner at one of the world’s most demanding circuits underscores just how tightly contested this grid has become. Margins measured in seconds of penalty time can redraw the entire narrative of a weekend.
Chaos at La Source and the Safety Car Lottery
The drama started before the field even reached Eau Rouge. Vito Postiglione, who had earned his third pole position of the season, was caught in contact at La Source on the opening lap. The Imperiale Racing driver spun and dropped through the order, a costly blow at a circuit where track position is notoriously difficult to recover.
Pavel Lefterov of Leipert Motorsport later acknowledged his involvement in the incident, offering an apology to Postiglione. The contact triggered a cascade of position changes that reshaped the race before it had truly begun. Postiglione and his co-driver Karol Basz mounted a recovery drive that eventually netted third in PRO, a result that speaks to both their pace and the attrition ahead of them.
A later safety car deployment, called to retrieve a car from a dangerous position, compressed the field and eliminated the gap Zampieri had built. That bunching made the restart procedure critical, and it was precisely the restart where Antonelli Motorsport’s winning car fell foul of the regulations. Spa’s 7-kilometer layout amplifies small errors. A misjudged restart gap that might go unnoticed at a shorter circuit becomes a clear infringement when officials have time and telemetry to review it.
The Full Podium: PRO-AM, AM, and Lamborghini Cup
Race 1 at Spa delivered clear storylines across all four competitive categories, each reinforcing how narrow the margins are throughout the Super Trofeo field.
John-Louis Jasper and Pavel Lefterov (Leipert Motorsport) claimed their first PRO-AM victory and finished an impressive second overall, a result strong enough to challenge several PRO entries on outright pace. Loris Spinelli and Juan Perez, running under the Antonelli Motorsport banner, finished fifth overall and second in class, maintaining their PRO-AM championship lead. Lorenzo Bontempelli and Emanuele Zonzini completed the PRO-AM podium for Iron Lynx, backing up their maiden win at Misano the previous round.
In AM, August MacBeth and Andrej Lewandowski delivered their third win of the season for VS Racing. Lewandowski now leads the AM standings, a consistent run that underscores how the category rewards reliability and racecraft over raw qualifying speed. Manuel Lauck and Florian Scholze (Dörr Motorsport) took second, with Miro Konopka (ARC Bratislava) rounding out the class podium.
Joseph Collado of AGS Events claimed his third Lamborghini Cup victory of the year following wins at Silverstone and Misano, establishing himself as the dominant force in the category. Gerard Van der Horst and Supachai Weeraborwornpong completed that podium.
| Category | Winner | Team | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| PRO | Pull / Snoeks | Bonaldi Motorsport | First win of season |
| PRO-AM | Jasper / Lefterov | Leipert Motorsport | 2nd overall, first class win |
| AM | MacBeth / Lewandowski | VS Racing | 3rd win of season, leads standings |
| Lamborghini Cup | Collado | AGS Events | 3rd win of season |
The Super Trofeo as a Development Ladder
The breadth of results at Spa illustrates something the raw classification cannot fully convey: the Super Trofeo functions as a layered development program, not merely a race series.
Originally launched with the Gallardo platform, the championship transitioned to the Huracán and now operates across Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Squadra Corse runs it as a vertically integrated program where identical Huracán Super Trofeo machinery eliminates the equipment variable and forces results to hinge on driver skill, team strategy, and pit execution. That last element proved decisive at Spa.
The AM and Lamborghini Cup categories cater to gentleman drivers, but the PRO and PRO-AM classes serve a more deliberate purpose. The grid generates real-world data on component durability, tire behavior, and driver feedback that feeds into Lamborghini’s broader GT racing programs. According to Autoblog, the Temerario GT3 unveiled at Goodwood in 2025 represents Lamborghini’s first competition car fully designed, developed, and built in-house. The operational knowledge accumulated across thousands of Super Trofeo race kilometers contributes to the engineering foundation for that kind of factory effort.
Rival one-make series from Ferrari and Porsche serve similar functions for those brands. What distinguishes the Super Trofeo is its direct organizational link to Squadra Corse’s factory programs. Drivers who excel here do not simply win trophies; they enter the field of vision of the people making decisions about GT3 and endurance racing seats.
Looking Ahead: Lind on Pole for Race 2
Target Racing’s Dennis Lind secured pole position for Race 2 after posting the fastest time in Q2. The Saturday race, scheduled with a rolling start and mandatory pit stop, promised another round of strategic complexity at a circuit that punishes small mistakes.
Championship standings after Spa remained fluid, with Spinelli and Perez holding the PRO-AM lead and Lewandowski atop the AM table, though Lamborghini did not publish full points breakdowns in the official Race 1 summary. With two rounds remaining after Spa, the title fights across all four categories still looked open, and if Race 1 proved anything, it is that the final classification at the checkered flag is never guaranteed to be the one that stands.
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