British GT, Oulton Park – Friday Notes
A Dilemma For M-Sport

Despite the cold snap and recent blizzards, it is reassuring to note that – apart from the hilly bits – Cheshire is pretty much a snow-free zone at present and likely to stay that way through the Easter weekend, meaning that the two days of the British GT meeting should go ahead as planned with no climatic interference. Good Friday is set-up day for the opening round of the BGT, and DSC went along to hunt for news, and also to check out some interesting liveries:

All David Ashburn's own work, apparently 888Batmobile Racing For Bikini Bottom? Ecosses

We’ll begin with driver news and the confirmation of Derek Johnston’s partner for this weekend in the #41 MTECH Ferrari 458 as being Julien Draper. The 28 year old joined his brother Matt in an MTECH 458 in the final race of the 2011 BGT, and raced in the Blancpain Endurance Series last season in a Von Ryan McLaren.

The line-up for the two Fortec Mercedes AMG SLS is almost complete. James Walker will be joined by Jason Minshaw in the #15, while Benji Hetherington’s name adorns the #14. We wait to see if a fourth driver name will be added to the roster. *Update* - Ollie Hancock will join Hetherington.

A more serious problem faces Barwell Motorsport, who might have to withdraw the Aston Martin Vantage of Mark Poole and Richard Abra from this weekend’s activities. We’ll have more on this in a separate story later.  

And things haven’t gone as planned for M-Sport ahead of their GT debut, as they learned yesterday that the 2013-spec Audi R8 LMS ultra hasn’t yet received FIA homologation approval! “Yes, it’s true,” said engineer Chris Grey. “We’ve now got to decide whether to convert it to 2012-spec or race with it as it is but in the Invitation class.” “We have to run this weekend,” said Team Manager John Wickham, “and we’ll have to decide in the next hour in what spec that will be. The problem is that this is a brand-new car, so was never in 2012-spec, and that this is the first GT car the team has had.” Moving away from this issue, how has testing gone? “We’ve had three days of testing,” said Grey. “Non-exclusive tests here at Oulton and Silverstone, but also an exclusive test at Anglesey, which was great. A fourth day of planned testing was snowed off, unfortunately.” The Audi will definitely compete in the first four rounds, after which things will depend on progress with the Bentley programme.

The Blendini Moto Audi was facing its own problems, as team boss and co-driver (with Dom Evans) Tom Roche explained; “We picked the car up at Silverstone a couple of weeks ago and tested it that day. We then came here, but the gearbox broke and it had to go back to Germany – it came back this morning!”

As the team prepared to begin the installation, work was also underway on the livery which should ultimately look like this:

James Walker was looking forward to driving with his old team Fortec again; “It’s really good being back – I raced in F3 with the team and was their first driver in World Series by Renault. I’ve also been told that I’m the reason why Fortec are here now – I’ve kept in touch with Richard Dutton and have been telling him that he should have an alternative route for those drivers that drop out of traditional single-seater racing; and then last year he told me that he’d bought the two Mercedes!”

The BGT drive is a one-off appearance at the moment, although further appearances could happen depending on what happens with discussions around other racing programmes; “I’m in discussions with ADR about racing their Oreca Nissan at the Silverstone WEC round at Silverstone – it’s not confirmed, but we’re very close to an agreement. Again, that’d be a one-off, but it’s important to be out there and show what I can do – it would be great to get back in a high-downforce car after three years of GTs. I also know Alan Docking – I drove for him once in Superleague Formula in the Glasgow Rangers car and was impressed by what I saw; and I know some of his guys, so it should be good.”

Glynn Geddie was looking forward to his own one-off outing in the #24 United Autosports McLaren, alongside Zak Brown; “I heard about it a couple of days ago and can’t wait,” said the Aberdeen-based Scot, who is looking considerably trimmer than he did when he won the title in 2011; has he been in the gym? “No, my preparation for this race was in Miami last week!” he laughed. “I was expecting to sit out this year entirely. I’ve just come back from working in Africa for nine weeks as we’ve got a big project going on out there, but as the season approached Dad and I began to get itchy feet; so we’ll be doing Dutch Supercar with United.”

Vita4One... ...and FF Corse 458s

Zoe Wenham was relishing the prospect of another season in British GT4, even though she is now – at the ripe old age of 18 – the elder half of the driver pairing; Declan Jones clocking in at Just 17. “We’ve got a brand-new, left-hand drive car this year, which apparently is better for clockwise circuits. We went to Zandvoort at the start of March for the BoP, but that’s the only running we’ve had in it; and since then they’ve increased the base-weight of the car from 1050kg to 1200kg! We won’t know until tomorrow how that will affect things, but four of the cars are Ginettas, while the [Complete Racing] Aston is a heavy car anyway.”

And what brought Jones to the BGT? “I did half a season of Ginetta Cup last year,” he began. “We couldn’t do the full season because of budget, so decided to concentrate on finding a full budget for this year – it was either this or SPEED, but decided on GTs as I want to go endurance racing.”

Track action kicks off tomorrow at Oulton Park, with practice and qualifying, with the two one-hour races following on Easter Monday.

MH