Gianmarco Ercoli will defend his NASCAR Whelen Euro Series championship title in 2024 with CAAL Racing, maintaining his status as CAAL’s lead driver for the new season.
Gianmarco Ercoli will defend his crown as the reigning NASCAR Whelen Euro Series champion after he confirmed his return to CAAL Racing’s flagship No. 54 team for the 2024 season.
Ercoli became the first Italian driver and also the first former EuroNASCAR 2 champion to win EuroNASCAR’s top prize after a dramatic year that saw him win three races – all consecutively – and finish on the podium five times.
However, it wasn’t smooth sailing for the Roman driver as he experienced a noticeable dropoff in performance in the second half of the season. After his fifth podium at Vallelunga, he could only score four top-5 finishes in the last six races of 2023.
Finding out a remedy for this will be an important goal to achieve for both Ercoli and CAAL as he admitted that it made the team lose important championship points, a factor that cost CAAL the Team’s title and nearly resulted in Ercoli losing the drivers title as well.
“I would say that I won the 2023 season thanks to my strong pace, but I want to improve my lap times and work hard with the team to collect more important victories during the 2024 season,” admits Ercoli to euronascar.com.
“We were the best team until mid-season, but we lost important championship points at the end of the year. We didn’t do a perfect job as a team to dominate the championship even more, so we want to work on our weaknesses and become the dominant force in EuroNASCAR PRO.”
With Sven van Laere having been confirmed as Ercoli’s new EuroNASCAR 2 teammate, CAAL used the Ercoli announcement to reveal the livery of the No. 54 Chevrolet Camaro that they will race this year.
The car will feature a minimalistic design, showcasing a black base with yellow and white stripes and swooshes. Hydraulic Performance Machines (HPM) and Steelduxx are set to follow van Laere to his new team and become the new primary sponsors of the No. 54 team.
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