2014 TUDOR United SportsCar Championship GT Le Mans Drivers’ champion Kuno Wittmer apparently made quite an impression during his first weekend driving for TRG-AMR. The French-Canadian’s fill-in role last weekend at the Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen as teammate to Christina Nielsen went about as well as he could hope for – until the final minutes of the race when he crashed the No. 007 V12 Vantage in difficult conditions.

The vacancy came as a result of regular TRG-AMR driver James Davison, who is committed to a full-time drive with Nissan in the Pirelli World Challenge series, and with at least one more conflict on the horizon, team owner Kevin Buckler tells RACER he would like to use Wittmer in an increasing role going forward.

“The crash doesn’t change my outlook on Kuno and what he did all weekend for us,” Buckler said. “He’s an awesome guy. He’ll do another conflict race for us at VIR in place of James, and he works incredibly well with Christina. He’s a great partner for her, and she’s really coming into her own in the series.”

TRG-AMR competes in a few different series, and looking to the future, Wittmer could be an in-house solution, provided he’s available.

“For myself, other than Chip Ganassi and Scott Pruett, we’ve had the longest relationships with our drivers; we had seven years with Andy Lally, and six years with Spencer Pumpelly, and Kuno definitely fits that mold,” Buckler added. “Should an opportunity arise, he’d definitely be on top of the list.”

Buckler’s California-based team will have plenty of work to do repairing the No. 007 before the next IMSA GT Daytona race at Lime Rock on July 24-25, and the veteran driver/owner hopes to break the strong of bad luck that has followed his program since Detroit in May.

“We went from hero to zero to hero to zero at the Glen,” he said. “I took over the engineering on the car and we put a killer rain setup on the car, we were in the lead, we lost a coil pack about two hours in and lost about 50 horsepower, but Kuno was doing great, even though we were about to get lapped, and I needed a Hail Mary. So I left him out on slicks while it was raining hoping to get time back under a yellow, got our lap back and I don’t know how he held on for so long.

“Everything was working out with 15 minutes to go, but he crashed. He doesn’t crash very often, but we mangled the car – second race in a row where we had a big crash at the end. It hurts, but the weekend up to that point was full of perfect execution, even Kuno, even Christina, but our luck has been ugly. We just need that to turn in Canada and get the wins we know we’re capable of.”