Silverstone race report July 18th/19th 2008

As the current leading team in both the GT 2 class and overall GT points battle, this race was very important to the team in order to maintain position so the Friday test day was used primarily to obtain the best set up we could for the Saturday race. The car was again faultless thanks to the excellent preparation carried out by Neil Garner Performance Engineering and we were able to achieve our intended goal. We scrubbed in two sets of tyres and changed the front discs and brakes to be on the safe side, we also checked all settings to make sure we had everything as it should be.

Qualifying, on the Saturday went extremely well, we thought we had the fastest lap with a 1.27.3 but were pipped at the last minute by the Masarati brothers with a stunning 1.26.7, which was a bit of a shame as we needed the extra point to increase our tally over the 911 virgin team who are our closest rivals in the championship.

Jan started the 3 hour race and was soon setting a really good 1.30/1.31 pace, he managed a few clear laps in the 1.29’s with the fresh tyres and generally progressed from our 14th grid place to 12th overall and 3rd in class prior to the first stop. Rod then took over and with a full fuel load and tyres that were well used, tried to maintain a 1.32 pace, but as in Jan’s stint, which was interrupted by one safety car period, Rod had two to contend with. These were useful as a fuel saving scenario as we wanted to avoid a splash and dash towards the end of the race, but they did nothing for driver concentration. We also had issues with the radio/pits to driver link so instructions were interrupted just to make things a little more difficult !!

With a total of three safety car periods, we were confident that the fuel would be okay for the last one hour stint for Jay, but we would need to push as the Ginetta G50 had slipped past us with a driver change under the safety car and were now 40 seconds ahead. Jay took over with new tyres and was soon reeling in the G50 and by half way through his run had caught and overtaken them. We were now in the lead of class 2 with fingers crossed that we had enough fuel to finish without another stop, Jay’s 1.29 race pace was using fuel at a rapid rate but he couldn’t drop the pace as the Top Cats Marcos was on the move and was heading for 2nd place if he too could catch the Ginetta, behind him was the Virgin 911 car with the fast paced Steve Bell at the wheel so all in all, we could not afford to ease off for a moment.

As luck would have it, we won the class race, and came in 9th overall which was exactly what we needed to achieve, but the Virgin 911 car bagged 3rd so we are now only 17 points clear of them in championship terms. We needed a 20 point margin to be sure of success in the championship so it’s now all down to Snetterton on the 16th/17th of August. We will need to win again and this time the pressure will be on to gain the extra points from fastest qualifying and quickest race laps if we are to say ahead of the Virgin 911 team.

We do however have one last trick up our sleeve if the points don’t fall our way, for whilst the Virgin 911 team will have competed in all 8 races, we will have only competed in 7 so if need be, we could enter the November Night race to see if we could improve our points tally. Each team can compete in 8 rounds, only 7 rounds count towards the championship, so a bad result can be dropped. Having said that, our worst result was a 4th place and 17 points, but we managed an extra point for the fastest race lap thus 18 points is our worst level. There will be a possible 22 points on offer from the night race so if the Virgin 911 car is under 4 points away, we will be very tempted to see if we can up our tally, we shall see how it all pans out.