Britcar 24hrs Night Qualifying

Qualifying only in the sense of each driver needing to complete the mandatory three laps in darkness, so the lap times wouldn’t count towards a grid position.

With that in mind, most team elected to utilise the early part of the two-hour session to get each driver qualified, before trying out any clever stuff, so it was no surprise to see the same frontrunners from the early part of the daytime session – the Lotus Cars Evora, the RJN Nissan 370Z, and the Jet Alliance Porsche – at the top of the timing screens ,though this time they were joined by the Team Jota Aston Martin. 

It took a while before the big guns came into their own – Phil Dryburgh had placed the MJC Ferrari 430 fifth in his opening stint, and the car stayed around there for much of the session  - but the Aquilla was on top come the halfway mark.

The rain, and the darkness, though, did bring problems; Keith Ahlers’ Morgan lost a long spell beached in the gravel, the Tischner twins’ BMW was towed in by a recovery truck, and the little Chimptune Elise had a fairly substantial engine fire towards the end of the pit straight as the session drew to a close.

And what a close it was – The Rollcentre  Challenge-spec . Mosler had at last got it hooked-up, posting  2:15.196 on the drying track, to which Phil Keen responded with 2:13.250 in the Eclipse Mosler. Seeing that the track was getting faster, both Barnes, and Calum Lockie in the Strata21 Mosler  sniffed a top time, and got past the line for a flyer just before the chequered flag was flown. Lockie’s  2:13.636 got him third, but it was Barnes who took the final glory, at 2:12.001.

A relieved Martin Short was keen to tell the tale:

“ It’s been a terrible day – we only finished, or rather stopped working on the car, at 1am on Thursday, and in testing we found the car amazingly quick, but with myriad electrical problems, and other things not working, which limited our track time and set up time.

"We found this morning that our dry settings didn’t translate to the wet conditions, and the car was a big handful, which didn’t give the drivers enough time in the car, but we did fix the electrical issues.  I went out first tonight, and set it up for the wet, but it was Jon Barnes, who hasn’t raced since Dijon last July, who put in the fastest lap.

"Steve Quick put his laps in, then we saw that Eclipse had gone quickest, so we put Jon back in, and he crossed the line three seconds before the flag came out, to get the fastest lap again. To be honest, there have been times today when I’ve considered ways of withdrawing, but this has been a massive, massive boost for the team, for all the hard work over the last few weeks. As for the race though, who knows – it could be a different matter”.

The Jet Alliance Porsche maintained its superiority in Class 2 – a strong tip for overall honours, this – with the Bryant’s Marcos, and the Topcats similar machine completing the class top three.

The Lotus Cars Evora kept its position at the head of Class 3, just three-quarters of a sec ond ahead of the NGR/Azteca Porsche, with the RJN Nissan 370Z third. Class 4 saw, once again, the BPM Seat Supercopa fastest, in front of the LNT Ginetta G40 and Seat Leon of Ivor Breuckers Dutch team.

Steve Wood