Former DTM champion Spengler had his first taste of the Team Studie BMW M4 GT3 he will drive alongside Seiji Ara in five of this year’s eight SUPER GT races at Okayama.
Since exiting the DTM at the end of 2019, Spengler has focused mostly on GT racing, joining BMW’s IMSA programme with the M8 GTE for 2020-21, and more recently contesting the Rolex 24 at Daytona in the M4 GT3 earlier this year.
The Canadian says that his first visit to the SUPER GT paddock came as a surprise in terms of the quality of the championship - something he rates as being similar to IMSA - and the number of fans that turned out for the first official test of the season.
“When I was looking at the cars in the pits and the paddock, I was saying to ‘Bob’ [Yasuaki Suzuki, team owner], this reminds me of the old DTM days,” Spengler told Motorsport.com.
“Everything is so clean and professional, everyone is pushing hard, the cars are nice. The GT500s are of course impressive, but even the GT300s are very professional, maybe the most professional GT3-based series I’ve seen, alongside IMSA.
“I would say that here and IMSA are the places that you really want to be as a GT3 driver.
“I was also impressed at the number of fans that are here just for a test. It seems like there were more people than for some races I’ve seen recently. It just shows the high level of this championship and how lucky I am to be able to race here.”
The BMW shared by Ara and Spengler placed 18th across the two days of testing at Okayama, with Ara setting the car’s best lap time of 1’26.294 on the opening day.
Spengler himself meanwhile set a personal best effort of 1’26.851 on the second day.
The 39-year-old said he still feels he is amid a “learning process” with Studie’s confidential Michelin tyres, which behave differently to the commercially-available tyres he is used to.
“They have a lot of grip, but it takes a certain amount of adaptation to learn how to use the grip, and also how to not push too much,” he explained.
“It’s easy to get carried away, you feel so much grip and you want to use it, but it’s easy to overheat the tyres. Not pushing too much is the key to these tyres.”
On his targets for the opening race, Spengler added: “It’s very hard to say. I don’t know if we can read too much into the results of this test.
“I think we can still improve, and the tyre choice will be really important for the first race. If you have the right tyre for the conditions, in the right temperature window, you can gain a lot.
“If we can do that, we have the chance to get a good result, because the car feels good.”
