British GT, Spa – Friday Notes
Restricted Running The weather couldn’t be finer for the British GT Championship’s visit to Spa Francorchamps – sunny, warm, a gentle breeze…..unbelievable, in other words; but no, here’s the proof…….. The first news of the day concerned the outcome of the last race at Knockhill, which ended with various protests flying around; the most significant of which was one lodged by MTECH against race winners Preci-Spark following a clash early in the race that led to the red Ferrari’s retirement. Having reviewed the video evidence, Bernard Cottrell has decided that this was a racing incident and that the results stand. The BGT will be racing on the seven kilometre circuit with the Belcar and Aston Martin British GT4 Challenge series, meaning that a remarkable 63 cars took to the track for the one-hour free practice session. However, due to a busy schedule, that was the sum total of practice time available before qualifying later in the afternoon; and there were several long faces after it concluded owing to various issues that cropped up. Olly Bryant went out straight away in the #106 Trackspeed Porsche (all the BGT runners being renumbered for this race) with the intention of bedding in pads before handing over the GT3 R to Oliver Morley for the majority of the session. However, the engine cut out at T12 and the car coasted to a stop; “I tried various restart sequences and got it going after about a minute,” he explained, “but at the next left hander it died again. It was fine in right hand corners but was cutting out in left handers, so I managed to get it back by constantly flicking the car right whenever the engine died.” The problem was eventually traced to a loose plug in the ECU; “All those components in the GT3 are from the roadcar, whereas in the GT2 car they are all proper snap-fit parts. It’s very frustrating as it meant that Oliver and I basically only got one flying lap each.” Richard Westbrook was having a better time of it in the #107, the FIA GT2 Champion heading the BGT times throughout the session and only being bettered by Marc Goossens in a ProSpeed (Westbrook’s ‘other’ team) Porsche from the Belcar series. Westbrook did improve his time by about a second and a half towards the end of the session, but we understand that the team had put on some FIA GT3 Michelins for comparison purposes. The Reiter Lamborghini Gallardo was second fastest in the hands of Peter Kox, but then there was quite a gap until the first of the many Ferraris, that of MTECH. Allan Simonsen had a subdued session in the #103 Rosso Verde Scuderia; “Because I wasn’t in the car at Knockhill, we’ve found various issues with the setup that we’ve had to dial out. That’s taken a lot of the available time – and we’ll still be setting up during qualifying – and we need to give Hector as much time as possible.” Tom Ferrier was reasonably satisfied with his practice; “Very uneventful – we just bedded in bits and bobs and that was it really.” The race will run to a new format this weekend: • Two mandatory stops (at any time) – 110 seconds for refuelling, 70 for driver-change only
• Each driver must drive for a minimum of 45 minutes
• Tyres: eight marked tyres for qualifying and start of race, then free
• Results attract double points Qualifying is also different, with two overlapping 40-minute sessions taking place; the GT3 cars going in the second and the G4 runners the first. MH | 
