NEWS

On the eve of the world’s biggest GT3 endurance race, the Spa 24 Hours, Czech team Mičánek Motorsport achieved something special. As perennial Pro-Am and Am title contenders, they were used to standing on the top step of the podium. But this time, it was different.

At the start of the 2026 Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe season, team principal Jíri Mičánek was clear about his squad’s ambitions for the coming campaign. Having won the Pro-Am title in 2024 – and crowned Pro-Am champions in the GT2 European Series last year – nothing short of another class title would suffice.

On top of that, it was just class success that mattered to Mičánek. Overall podiums, and even victories have been the target for 2026. There was reason for this kind of optimism; after all, it has in Anthony Pretorius, one of the rising stars of the Lamborghini Super Trofeo Junior Driver programme onboard to partner Bronislav Formánek.

That ambition was met early in the season, with Pretorius claiming pole position for the second race at Paul Ricard a strong indicator of a title-contending campaign. Come Spa-Francorchamps, it got even better, as the pair took overall victory in the first race of the weekend, beating the Pro field to claim the team’s first-ever outright victory in Super Trofeo.

This success has been a long time coming for the Czech outfit which started out as a small team with Mičánek’s father – also called Jíri - at the helm.

“It all began with my father, who used to race when he was younger, mainly in hill climbing where he was a 25-time Czech champion,” Mičánek Jr explains.

“He was just racing by himself, so that is where the Mičánek Motorsport racing team started. Because of my father’s success, the team became quite popular and people wanted to race with him, which is how the team expanded in the Czech Republic.

“I joined the team when I started to race too; it was the natural step for me to join the family team when I began racing in Formula BMW.”

For the younger Jíri, there were dreams of climbing the single seater ladder towards Formula One. Having raced alongside the likes of future four-time F1 world champion Sebastian Vettel and race winner Sergio Pérez, the competition was fierce and the level high.

Then, the fork in the road arrived. Inevitable for those aiming for the top of motorsport. With budgets rising, opportunities closing and the landscape of racing ever changing, decision had to be made for Mičánek’s future.

“After formula cars, I moved into GTs and did the Porsche Carrera Cup between 2006 and 2008,” he says.

“It was a difficult time to go racing because, although I was winning Porsche championships in the Czech Republic, I didn’t have enough money to move into GT2 or GT3 at the time, so my career basically finished then. I decided to stop because I had nowhere to go racing.”

A brief stint back in single seaters followed, but the writing was on the wall. If Mičánek was to continue in motorsport, it would be by resurrecting the family team...with the help of a few friends naturally.

“In 2015, another Czech team came to me; the boss was in Super Trofeo with many cars. And he said to me, ‘do you want to buy Gallardo Super Trofeo. And I had no clue because all the time I was racing with Porsche and my father and everything was in Porsche.

“I took over the team in 2015, and I had to build up the team again because we were not doing much racing anymore. We had just one car and the workshop, and my father had already stopped racing. We had to start everything from zero pretty much.

“It wasn’t a big job for me, because even when I wasn’t racing, I was the manager of [former driver] Josef Zaruba, so I still had connections for mechanics and engineers who could come and work with me. I was still in the motorsport business, so it wasn’t so hard. I was also working for a Spanish team, Adrian Valles Racing so that made it easier.

“The Spanish connection has also stayed with us to this day too, because I worked with those guys at AVR, and we have a lot of Spanish people working with us, like Borja our chief engineer. I don’t want to say that we are half Spanish as a team, but we like cooperating with them and they are a big part of our team.

Now running the team full-time, Mičánek first entered Super Trofeo Europe in 2019 and has been, with the exception of the 2025 season, a regular ever since. In parallel to their one-make operations, the team has also raced in the Central European Zone ESET endurance series with a pair of Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2s.

But the one constant in Mičánek Motorsport’s recent history has been Super Trofeo Europe. According to Jíri Jr, the championship continues to suit their size, needs and ambitions.

Naturally, we would like to take the next step and maybe do GT3. It is a target, but we need to do it for the right reasons”, Mičánek says.

“We have the money to do it, that is not a problem, but in order to be competitive in GT3, you need to have very strong drivers with the right budget, and that is what we don’t have consistently.

“Unless you have all the ingredients to do it properly, there is no point to go there and finish 55th in the race, because then it is much harder to sell success to the sponsors who don’t understand multi-class racing etc.

“They could come to us and say: ‘hey guys, you were winning last year, but now you are last’, it is not always easy to explain that to them. So, this is why we decide to stay in one-make and in Super Trofeo, where we know what we are, we know how to do it, we can achieve podiums and good results.”

Since their full-time return to Super Trofeo Europe, Mičánek Motorsport is fighting for titles in both the Pro-Am and Am class. Their ambitions are obvious: immediate success is the plan, but always with one eye on the future.

“Our target for this year is very clear; we want to win the titles,” Mičánek adds. “We want to win Pro-Am again, because we have already won it before, and the Am title. For us, it doesn’t make sense to say we want to finish in the top three or the top five. We are competitive and we want to win

“We like the championship; we like cars. For sure there are some things that could be improved and that are not the same as before but there is a new car coming and we want to continue with the Temerario Super Trofeo next year also.”