GT Open frontrunner hits out at handicap rules
International GT Open championship contender Martin Kodric has hit out at the series’ success handicap system, calling it “bulls***” and saying that it creates “carnage” by incentivising lower finishes.
Teams who finish in the top three of each of the series’ races are given an additional pitstop handicap time for the following contest, with the winner getting 15 seconds added to their minimum stop time, second place getting 10s added and third place getting 5s.
Kodric in his Teo Martin Motorsport Mclaren 720S was running third in Silverstone’s second International GT Open race. Both he and fourth-placed Norbert Siedler’s Emil Frey Racing Lamborghini slowed late on in an attempt to finish fourth rather than third.
They were caught by Oliver Wilkinson’s Aston Martin and Miguel Ramos’s Mercedes, and amid the multi-car fight on the last lap, Ramos hit Kodric, spinning Kodric into Wilkinson.
Kodric finished sixth and Wilkinson seventh, while
Ramos got a 10s penalty for the clash, dropping him to fifth.
“It’s a bit of a bulls*** championship rule,” Kodric told MN. “Where it all [the problem] starts is the penalties that you carry on [to the following round]. It’s just the risk that you take because it’s a carnage in the end with people slowing down, me slowing down [and] Lambos slowing down.
“We decided to go for fourth position as that’s, in this championship, sadly the best thing to do, to clear the penalties.”
However Alfredo Filippone of championship organiser GT Sport says competitors seeking to finish fourth rather than third “doesn’t happen very often because experience tells that grabbing the most points you can is always a more effective way to be ahead.
“It does work very well and we think it’s better than technical measures which change the behaviour of the cars. Now of course teams do their strategies and it’s up to them!”