2018 Porsche Carrera Cup GB champion, Tio Ellinas, will race in the Porsche Supercup in 2019…
The 2018 Porsche Carrera Cup GB champion, Tio Ellinas, will graduate to the Porsche Supercup for the 2019 season. The Cypriot driver narrowly clinched championship victory over rival Dino Zamparelli in the final race of the 2018 Carrera Cup GB season as the title battle went down to the wire. Having secured top championship honours he is now ready for his next Porsche racing challenge on the international stage. Announcing the move on his social media channels, Ellinas said: “I’m proud and honoured to announce that next year I’ll be participating in Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup with Lechner Racing.
“First of all I want to thank the guys behind the scenes that made this deal a reality and also to Walter Lechner for giving me the opportunity to be part of his team for 2019. Let’s race…”
In 2018 Ellinas raced for the Slidesports Engineering squad in the Carrera Cup GB, in moving to Lechner Racing he will drive for the team that took Michael Ammermüller to championship victory last year. Last season the Austrian outfit also ran Porsche Junior driver Thomas Preining together with 2014 Carrera Cup GB champion, Josh Webster. The Supercup announcement came less than a month after Ellinas made an impressive debut in the Porsche BWT GT3 Cup Challenge Middle East winter series (run by Lechner Racing) – taking overall victory in his first outing in Dubai.
Ellinas’s 2019 Supercup campaign will see the 26-year-old return to the Formula One support package for the first time since 2014. During his junior career Ellinas spent time racing in GP3 and GP2 (now Formula 2) between 2012 and 2014 – he made the switch to sports car racing in 2017 with Nick Tandy’s JTR team. Despite now racing in a different discipline, Ellinas has experience of competing on many of the tracks the Supercup circus will visit in support of F1 during the 2019 season which may prove advantageous.
