The new Garage 59 McLaren squad took a narrow victory at the Monza Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup opener with Rob Bell, Come Ledogar and Shane van Gisbergen.

Van Gisbergen withstood a challenge from HTP Mercedes driver Maximilian Buhk over the final 20 minutes to take the flag 0.341s ahead after three hours of racing.

Bell had propelled the McLaren 650S GT3 up from 16th on the grid to third position before the end of his stint.

The McLaren with Ledogar behind the wheel emerged in the lead following the first round of stops after Jazeman Jafaar, who had taken over the Mercedes-AMG GT3 from Dominik Baumman, in lost time leaving the pits with an ECU glitch.

Jafaar made inroads into the McLaren’s lead, which stood at as much as 10 seconds, before hitting traffic in the final stages of the middle hour of the race and falling away.

Buhk was nine seconds behind after the final round of stops and was able to close that gap in just over half an hour.

The McLaren and the Mercedes then ran nose to tail to the chequered flag, but Buhk was unable to find a way past.

Van Gisbergen said: “It was pretty crazy and he had a couple of big goes.

“It was good to come away with a win at a circuit where we didn’t think we’d be very competitive.”

The best of the M-Sport Bentley Continental GT3s finished third, nearly half a minute behind, in the hands of Andy Soucek, Wolfgang Reip and Maxime Soulet.

Fourth place went to the RJN Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3 shared by Lucas Ordonez, Mitsunori Takaboshi and Alex Buncombe.

The Kessel Racing Ferrari 488 GT3 shared by Michal Broniszewski, Alessandro Bonacini and Andrea Rizzoli took pro-am class honours with fifth place overall.

The top Audi R8 LMS was the WRT entry shared by Will Stevens, Antonio Garcia and Nico Muller in sixth place.

RESULT – 96 LAPS

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