In a surprise announcement earlier Today, the NGT Motorsport team, headed by Henrique Cisneros, have withdrawn, with immediate effect, from the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship. After having competed in the first five rounds of the championship already this year, the team is pulling all of their efforts from the series, with the exception of September’s Circuit of the Americas round.
Cisneros, who also missed the Six Hours of the Glen race last month, has cited business and family obligations as the reason for the MOMO-backed #30 911 GT America team’s departure from North America’s premier sports car series.
Henrique Cisneros – NGT Motorsport Team Director
“Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions and this is one of those times for me. Racing is such a joy in my life, however at this current time I need to focus on business and family.
Turmoil in my home country of Venezuela is affecting both of these and that needs to be the center of my attention right now.
I love racing and hate to step out of it and leave my teammates, Kuba and Christina and Ramez on the sidelines for most of the rest of the year, but it is what I must do. I look forward to the race in Austin in September and hope things improve in Venezuela and I can return to racing regularly.”
The United SportsCar Championship has already suffered a few major losses this year, with a few teams packing up and heading home, but the MOMO guys taking their leave will certainly hit the paddock hard. The team is extremely professionally run, and they have always turned out a really nice Porsche.
With NGT leaving, the series will lose more than just one little GTD team, TUSCC will also lose an important source of new media coverage as well. In conjunction with the /Drive network, the MOMO NGT boys and girls have had a number of videos released featuring their 991 GT America, and the views are numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Losing that fan-favorite video series could also adversely affect the number of viewers that watch the races, and the number of spectators that show up at the track.
Here’s hoping that Cisneros and the rest of the NGT crew will be able to sort things out and return in 2015. Having won their class at both Petit Le Mans, and the Long Beach circuit, the MOMO NGT team is an excellent Porsche team, and we’ll certainly miss them in future rounds.
Despite the team’s decision to leave the United SportsCar Championship, the NGT cars will continue to run in the IMSA GT3 Cup Championship with Eduardo Cisneros (brother to Enrique) as one of the drivers.
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