Team Insight: VSR

When Vincenzo Sospiri hung up his helmet in the early 2000s, he had one thing in mind. Building his own team and helping young drivers make it in the cut-throat world of motorsport.

To say he has been successful in his endeavours is perhaps an understatement: these days, his eponymous VS Racing is one of the most successful Lamborghini Squadra Corse customers teams in the business.

And it is not finished yet.

Sospiri was one of Europe’s up-and-coming talents of the 1990s, competing at the highest level in single seaters and winning the coveted Formula 3000 title, then seen as a necessity to make it into Formula One.

Having spent a year as a test driver, Sospiri finally got his big break with the Lola F1 Team, which lasted a mere one-and-a-half rounds before falling apart. Not one to dwell on the past, Sospiri is all about then here and now, and he’s as competitive as a team boss as he was as a driver.

“In 2000, the year after I stopped racing, I had a year off, I didn’t do anything,” says Sospiri.

“And then, in 2001, I decided to start my own team and help the young drivers to achieve what I didn’t manage to do, which was to be in Formula One.

“I stopped my career early, I was still getting paid quite a lot of money and had good speed, but I decided to stop and help the young guys. So, we started with formula cars, we had two cars to start with and then expanded to eight. Two cars in Formula 3000, three cars in Formula 3 and three cars in Formula Renault, which is now Formula Regional.

“So, that is how we started and then around 2013 and 2024, I started to realise that it was almost impossible to get drivers into F1 so then I started to think about GT racing, which is a lot easier to help drivers achieve their goals of becoming professional.”

From there, the journey took a different direction, with Lamborghini entering the scene courtesy of a bond struck between Sospiri and Lamborghini’s former head of motorsport, Giorgio Sanna.

The relationship stuck and, since then, VSR has rarely looked back.

“We started with the Super Trofeo cars in 2015, but we were still running the single seater cars in Japan in Formula 4. It was called the Lamborghini Junior programme and we did that for three years.

“But we had moved into GT racing at the end of 2015, start of 2016 and we have continued to do Super Trofeo and GT3 since then, always with Lamborghini.”

The dual programmes in the one-make championship and national and international GT3 competition has its own unique stresses and complications, but for VSR it’s all part of the job. Crossover between mechanics is not uncommon but key to a successful partnership remains keeping both as distinctly disparate entities, especially when both end up racing on the same weekend.

Sospiri keeps a close eye on everything, while his wife Jessica acts as team manager across both Super Trofeo and GT3 operations, leaving her “running around all over the place” during a typical race weekend.

Although based in Forlì, situated nicely between Imola and Misano Adriatico, VSR has for many years had an important presence in Asia. Stemming from its Formula 4 days in Japan, the team has been a regular competitor in Super Trofeo Asia and more recently GT World Challenge Asia.

Following the pandemic, VSR finally returned to the series at the start of 2024, with two official entries and a third resulting from a unique partnership with two of Japan’s biggest influencers.

Nijiko Wakabayashi is the owner of the Japanese fashion brand, Sheller, and along with influencer “Ami” she has formed ANR which has partnered with VSR for the team’s maiden assault on GTWC Asia.

“I was first attracted to racing with the Japanese Grand Prix and when I saw that for the first time, I knew I wanted to get involved with racing,” Nijiko-san explains.

“I knew nothing about racing before, so we had to gain some experience with other teams as customers. But when you are a customer, you cannot really do what you want to so we decided that we would create our own team and doing it this way we have been to get the good people in the team and work on our own goals.”

Competing in the Silver-Am category of the series, the #563 has a strong Pro-Am driver line-up of Akira Mitzutani and Lamborghini Young Professional Driver Yuki Nemoto – who cut his teeth with VSR in both Lamborghini Super Trofeo in Asia and Europe before forging a career in GT3 in both continents.

With a myriad of manufacturers to choose from, Nijiko-san was drawn in by Lamborghini in particular and says that the decision to partner with Sant’Agata Bolognese was an easy one in the end.

“For me, my brand is all about style and attention to detail and when we were looking for the perfect manufacturer for our project, we saw that Lamborghini also shares our passion for detail, so it was an easy choice in the end.

“When you see the engineers and mechanics in the factory, they are always proud to work for Lamborghini and they are always focusing on the details, and I felt a connection between our two brands.

“Since we’ve been working together, with VSR which is an amazing team, we have seen the hard work and precision, so this is a partnership which excites me a lot.”
On the track, the partnership has shown glimpses of promise, particularly on the Japanese circuits where Akira-san is more familiar. But such is the competitiveness of the GTWC Asia series, the incredible work and determination is still waiting to be rewarded with the breakthrough result it deserves.

But one thing is for sure, the drive of ANR and the prowess and experience that Sospiri brings to the wider operation means success is surely only a small step away.