British GT, Silverstone – Sunday Morning Notes
A Fascinating Race In Prospect

After initial doubts about the BBC Weatherman’s recently-spoken words, the few spots of moisture in the air disappeared and the sun did its best to break through lifting cloud cover, leaving Silverstone a reasonably pleasant place to be on Sunday morning.

Things kicked off with the usual ten-minute warm-up session and 23 of the 26 cars took part. Unfortunately for the Jones brothers, the Preci-Spark Ascari failed to complete its outlap after it lost drive (no further details), leaving the team with a job to do before the race. Elsewhere, the problem during qualifying for the #21 Chad Ferrari was a major gearbox failure; Dan Brown revealing that he was on a flier and estimated that he would have been just a second off Steven Kane’s pace had he been able to complete the lap. He also revealed that “Steven would have taken pole [in the #15 Chad car] by four-tenths, but was baulked by a couple of Ginettas. I was watching the in-car footage and you could hear him swearing over the noise of the engine!” The #21 didn’t take part in the warm-up either after a wheel bearing problem was discovered.

The other two cars not to take part were the Stark Racing Ginetta – here this weekend as a rehearsal for the Britcar 24 in October – and the Joe Osborne G50.

Darren Turner was on duty for Beechdean-Barwell during the session and set the fastest time, with 1:54.021, about a second ahead of the Rosso Verde Ferrari. In G4, the Hetherington Ginetta of century Motorsport was fastest, while Rob Bell managed the remarkable feat of matching – to the thousandths of a second – his qualifying time.

“I’m finding [driving the Ginetta G50] a real challenge," said the two-time LMS GT2 champion. "It’s a great little car but it has no downforce at the back, something I’m struggling to adapt to.

“It’s relatively easy to adapt from a car with no downforce to a car that has some, but it’s way trickier doing it the other way around!”

While Bell is making his series debut, two other drivers are returning to the series. Stuart Hall gives the Vantage Racing DBRS9 its race debut this afternoon; "The car is absolutely brand new and we haven’t done much testing so we’re working as much on finding the basic balance as anything else.  I’m up for it though – have a look where I am by lap 5!" Pole-sitter Richard Westbrook, meanwhile, is finding things more straightforward; "I’m really enjoying this weekend, this is a very nice Championship with some very good drivers.  I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in with Simmo, Darren and the rest.  I’d love to do more rounds."

Hall is one of only two pro drivers to start the race, the other being Tom Ferrier in the #10 Chad Ferrari.

Picking a winner for this race is far from easy, with no clear favourite jumping out from the page. However it turns out, this race is unlikely to be run-of-the-mill.

MH/GG