BRITISH F4
Two moments particularly stand out from Kiern Jewiss’s titlewinning season.
The first was an amazing fight back in the second race at Donington Park in April as he surged from 13th on the grid to take the win, after a sequence of quite brilliant overtakes. The other came at the opposite end of the season when he passed both Ayrton Simmons and Dennis Hauger at Luffield in a breath-taking move to take third place in race two at Silverstone.
In many ways those two moments sum up the Double R driver’s season. They proved his overtaking prowess and demonstrated his impressive pace too. And that maiden F4 win at Donington laid down a marker to his rivals and began a sequence of results that catapulted 16-year-old Jewiss into the points lead.
But Jewiss – who also starred as a rookie in Ginetta Junior last term – did not have things all his own way. Ayrton Simmons topped the standings in the early part of the season as his experience told.
After two seasons at Arden, a late switch to the JHR Developments squad gave the 17-year-old a new lease of life and he took seven podiums from the first nine races. But engine problems at Croft stopped him in his tracks and he was never quite able to regain the same form in the second half of the year.
Jewiss wasn’t as impressive after the mid-season break, either. A couple of clumsy collisions with Simmons hampered both drivers but Jewiss still took six podiums to Simmons’s four with no DNFS (while Simmons twice retired). And that was enough to keep Jewiss comfortably ahead.
Instead the form driver over the second half of the year was Fortec’s Johnathan Hoggard. He only competed a part-season in F4 last year as he focused on his studies but was dominant from Rockingham onwards taking six wins from the final 11 races. Had he replicated that form earlier in the season – when he got caught up in a number of little incidents and didn’t display quite the same pace – he would’ve easily been crowned champion.
The other two drivers who came on strong as the year progressed were Arden’s Red Bull-backed duo of Dennis Hauger and Jack Doohan. The pair were incredibly evenly-matched all season and were regularly fighting for positions – things got too close at Rockingham when a botched move from Hauger caused them both to retire.
That allowed Hoggard to claim third in the final standings while Hauger took fourth ahead of Doohan, son of bike racing legend Mick, by just a solitary point. But both marked themselves as stars of the future as they battled with – and often beat – drivers with far more experience both in the car and of UK racing.