Silverstone Rounds 1/2 and Super GT

The wait for round 1 was finally over! I had planned all along to do the Super GT races in order to get practice on the starts for the sunday races as I felt this was something that helped me last year when I did the heat and therfore had a practice start before the rest of the grid did. It would also be benificial for practice. In the past silverstone had never been a track that liked me, having had something go wrong on every visit apart from the Birkett in 2010. Sadly this year wasn’t any different!

Super GT Qualifying  (4th/3rd)

I felt pretty confident going into qualifying having done a lot of work over the winter to the car and a lot of work on the computer trying to get my lines ready. (just for referance my fastest time on the computer was 1:10.9 and real time over the weekend was 1:10.79 so I would say its a good way to train in the future!)
While on track I had very little traffic until I locked up going into brooklands and rejoined with Matt Palmer on my bumper, having felt I was holding him up I let him through and stuck to his bumper for the rest of the session. this put me 4th in class for race 1 and 3rd in class for race 2 there was 11 cars in the class so I was really happy to see my times were at the front of the group.

Super GT Race 1  (4th in class)

My 1st start didn’t really go to plan I got way too much wheel spin and I think I lost about half a cars length at the start, but at least these races were just for practise so I learnt that was over the limit. Hinson had some sort of issue during the early part of the race (later found out to be an embarasing mistake which I won’t go into!) how ever he over come this issue and got the fastest lap of the race late on. This left me Palmer and Stuart Nicholes fighting for the top spot in our class. I soon got passed Stuart and a gap slowly appeared in between us. The gap to palmer was fairly big and I feel I was closing in by a very very small margin every lap how ever this then ended up with me spitting the car off the track as I believe my tyre pressures were too high and they gave up their grip. Thankfully I didn’t hit anything and rejoined the race someway back I managed to get back up to finish 4th in class at the end of the race. I learnt a few bits of this race which I carried over for the rest of the weekend.

Super GT Race 2  (3rd in class)

I started 3rd on the grid and with a fairly un eventful race finished there too. at the start of the race Palmer and Hinson (who had recovered from his earlier problem) had a little dice and I was in the perfect spot to watch it about half a second behind them. Then when they had sorted themselves out it was simply just Hinson, Palmer, me with no spills of overtakes going on for any of us.

Championship Qualifying (4th/4th)

Continuing my good form from saturday I went out into qualifying and some how got lucky with finding my self some space I got into a good rhythem early on, then had to generate some space due to closing in on a pack of cars, my early qualifying time was 1:11.03 which was a tenth faster than saturdays best and 6 tenths faster than saturdays qualifying session. I knew 1:10s were possible as hinson and palmer had both dropped into the 10s on saturday.
Once I had cleared the traffic I pushed on again and then put in a 1:10.79 with the following lap being my final lap and it coming in at a 1:10.83  very consistant so I was pleased and confident it would give me 2 good grid positions for the races, which it did both races I was due to start 4th behind Hinson, Hefford and Palmer so fairly similar to saturday just with Guy Hefford joining us.

Championship Race 1 (14th, 13th in class)

Starting 4th on the grid I got a great launch perfect traction and pulled away nicely, so it seemed the plan for saturday had paid off! Hefford Hinson and Palmer all jumped the start slightly so going into the 1st corner I was still in 4th place coming out of it how ever I felt I could get past palmer and get 3rd place but I missed my braking point and locked the rear wheels spun out and got collected by Ben Rowe who had apsolutely no where to go. I dropped down to aproximately 19th place and on the last lap of the race I was sat in 6th place (I thought I was still in the double digits) so with championship points in my head I thought lets go for it into brooklands where I had past a lot of cars during this race. Sadly Matt who was in 5th had the same coach as me (malcolm edison) so it proved a lot tougher to find the advantage I needed, we were both glued to the inside down the straight leading up to the corner. Little did we know there had been coolant or oil dropped on the track just infront of us we both then went off the track and my car stalled so took a long time to get going again. When I did get going again I crossed the line in 14th place which was 13th in class. Fairly gutting after all the hard work it took to get me to 6th place and prior to that race over the winter. However out of 35cars 14th was still a decent result, better half of the feild so i’m still pleased with the points i’ll have on the board.

The car was actually too badly damaged from the 1st crash to satisfy the safety regs so that was the end of my days racing. Currently we are not 100% sure of the full extent of the damage susstaned but we know it won’t be either Cheap or easy to fix.

me and my dad are both going to work our hardest to get the car fit and ready to be out at brands hatch at the end of the month but currently it does look like a difficult job and we have yet to discover the full extent of the damage. I’m still looking for sponsors so if anyone is willing to sponsor me and help me get my car to brands hatch I will be interested to hear from you. Please contact me through the form on the contact us page.