Marc van der Straten died at his home in Switzerland on July 5, at age 78. If your motorsport diet is heavy on GT3 and Blancpain results, you know his name from a BMW Z4 that tore through the Spa 24 Hours a decade ago. If you follow Grand Prix motorcycle racing, you know it from a Moto2 garage that quietly produced three world champions. What most people on either side of that divide don't realize is that it's the same man, running the same family operation, for the better part of three decades. That's the part of this story worth sitting with — not just the loss of a team owner, but the exit of one of the last people in professional racing who genuinely built something on both two wheels and four.
The timing makes it sting a little more. Seven days before he passed, a Boutsen VDS-run Porsche crossed the line eighth overall at the 79th running of the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, an event SRO Motorsports Group itself markets as the biggest GT race on the planet. Van der Straten was, by every account from people who worked with him, still fully engaged with that program. He didn't get a slow fade into retirement. He got one more finish on the board first.
Van der Straten came from the van der Straten-Ponthoz family, tied to the lineage behind Stella Artois, which tells you where the checkbook came from but not why he spent it on race cars. That part came from his father, a onetime racer himself, and it pointed young Marc toward a genuinely strange starting point: the Gillet Vertigo, a low-volume Belgian sports car that most enthusiasts outside the Ardennes have never heard of. Van der Straten ran it in the domestic Belcar series under the Belgian Racing banner before pushing into the international FIA GT Championship by 2005.
Here's the part that's easy to gloss over: the Vertigo program was never eligible to score points toward the actual GT championship, because ******* logation rules require a minimum number of road-going examples to exist before a manufacturer's race car can compete for a ******* le. Gillet never built enough Vertigos to clear that bar. Van der Straten was paying to go racing at the top level with a car that, on paper, couldn't win anything. That's either an expensive hobby or a serious statement about priorities, and by 2008 even he seemed to agree it was time to pivot.
The team rebranded as Marc VDS for 2009 and became a development partner for the Matech-built Ford GT1, which earned it one of twelve entries in the inaugural FIA GT1 World Championship in 2010 — a season that also included a Ford GT1 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a race the team wouldn't finish. The following year told a different story: a Kronos Racing/Marc VDS-entered Lola-Aston Martin LMP1 finished seventh overall at Le Mans with Vanina Ickx, Bas Leinders, and Maxime Martin sharing the car. If that surname looks familiar, yes, Vanina is Jacky Ickx's daughter, which is its own small piece of Belgian racing trivia buried inside a bigger one.
The timing makes it sting a little more. Seven days before he passed, a Boutsen VDS-run Porsche crossed the line eighth overall at the 79th running of the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, an event SRO Motorsports Group itself markets as the biggest GT race on the planet. Van der Straten was, by every account from people who worked with him, still fully engaged with that program. He didn't get a slow fade into retirement. He got one more finish on the board first.
Van der Straten came from the van der Straten-Ponthoz family, tied to the lineage behind Stella Artois, which tells you where the checkbook came from but not why he spent it on race cars. That part came from his father, a onetime racer himself, and it pointed young Marc toward a genuinely strange starting point: the Gillet Vertigo, a low-volume Belgian sports car that most enthusiasts outside the Ardennes have never heard of. Van der Straten ran it in the domestic Belcar series under the Belgian Racing banner before pushing into the international FIA GT Championship by 2005.
Here's the part that's easy to gloss over: the Vertigo program was never eligible to score points toward the actual GT championship, because ******* logation rules require a minimum number of road-going examples to exist before a manufacturer's race car can compete for a ******* le. Gillet never built enough Vertigos to clear that bar. Van der Straten was paying to go racing at the top level with a car that, on paper, couldn't win anything. That's either an expensive hobby or a serious statement about priorities, and by 2008 even he seemed to agree it was time to pivot.
The team rebranded as Marc VDS for 2009 and became a development partner for the Matech-built Ford GT1, which earned it one of twelve entries in the inaugural FIA GT1 World Championship in 2010 — a season that also included a Ford GT1 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a race the team wouldn't finish. The following year told a different story: a Kronos Racing/Marc VDS-entered Lola-Aston Martin LMP1 finished seventh overall at Le Mans with Vanina Ickx, Bas Leinders, and Maxime Martin sharing the car. If that surname looks familiar, yes, Vanina is Jacky Ickx's daughter, which is its own small piece of Belgian racing trivia buried inside a bigger one.
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