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Chris Froggatt and Eddie Cheever – son of the retired Formula 1 driver – already have the GT World Challenge Sprint Cup Pro-Am title to their names having won the championship in 2020. That was added to with a runner-up finish in the Endurance championship too and, as Froggatt jokes, there’s only one way up from there this season.

“We work together better and better every race weekend,” he says. “There’s one more place to go from there and we’re only going to get more and more competitive. We can both perform at the level we want to, and even though the competition will be challenging, we can manage a strong result this year.”

Continuity will play a key role as both will join forces once again in the series along with Hong Kong driver Jonathan Hui for Sky Tempesta Racing. Global events kept Hui away from the first round at Monza and the team struggled as a result. Froggatt believes that chemistry and understanding of one another will be crucial in the rest of the GT World Challenge Endurance season for the team’s hopes of the ’21 Pro-Am crown.

“It really can’t be replaced,” Froggatt says. “A good example of that was Monza. We had Stefan [Görig] join us and we hadn’t worked with him before. Not that he wasn’t perfectly able to do the job, but the differences – how he likes the car set up, doing driver changes a different way, all of that, it really does make a big difference. That relationship – it really is invaluable.”

Since that opening round of the season, the team rebounded to take victory at Paul Ricard to reignite their season.

A thorough postmortem after the Italian race led to a revamping of practice protocols for the Sky team as they aim to extract every ounce of performance where possible to secure another championship.

“We lost a bit of time in pitstops in the last couple of rounds,” Froggatt says. “At Monza, there was a problem due to driver error and then with it being the first race of the year, the team was a little slow with tyre changes. It’s easy to simulate the driver change when you’re sat around but when you’ve driven for an hour and everything’s hot, it’s quite a different scenario. We’ve been simulating a lot more live changes and I think we’ve gained from where we were previously.”
Focus now switches to Spa-Francorchamps on July 29-August 1. For Froggatt, it’s one of the best endurance races of the year and a brilliant chance for the team to score well with its Ferrari 488 GT3.

“Spa is undulating, has fast- and medium- speed corners and it’s very technical as well,” he adds. “That’s something that I enjoy and really like with the Ferrari. It’s a car that is really suited to high- and medium-speed corners. It’s just a real pleasure to drive and Spa is personally one of my favourite tracks. The expectations are pretty high this season.”

All the action from Spa will be available to watch on Sky Sports F1.