MUSTANG GT IN BRITISH GT
The British GT4 Championship concludes with a showdown at Silverstone
The penultimate three races of the 2020 British GT Championship bunched the main title protagonists even more tightly at the top of the points tables. The championship had produced six different winners from eight races and seven drivers, each with a chance of winning the overall GT4 championship.
Academy Motorsport drivers Matt Cowley and Jordon Albert in the #61 Multimatic Mustang GT4 had overpowered their 20-second ‘success penalty’ from Brands Hatch, scoring a second-place podium at Donington and making them the highest-scoring pair during the British GT4 Championship mid-season.
The two were clearly on a roll and had mastery over the car’s capabilities. As well as being able to consistently produce fast laps, the trick to a Balance-of-Performance formula like the British GT is for drivers to know the relative strengths of their car for passing moves at each track and, just as importantly, understand its weaker areas where they need to defend. We saw Matt and Jordan do exactly that at Brands Hatch and the second visit to Donington, but the rhythm of their high pointscoring run was about to be interrupted by an external event.
The popular and likeable Jordan Albert was forced to drop out of the campaign due to a change of circumstance. The vacuum that he left was not going to be easy to fill but Academy Motorsport veteran Will Moore was able to step up for the remaining two rounds at Snetterton and Silverstone.
Snetterton was to host two one-hour sprint races, while Silverstone was to be a showcase endurance round for the Silverstone 500 trophy and the end-of-season showdown. Moore had some brief seat-time in the Mustang at Circuit Paul Ricard in France during the BoP calibration days in the spring.
The delayed and compressed BGT Championship was now in its closing rounds under British autumn conditions, a world away from spring in the South of France.
Moore and Cowley had previously been teammates in European GT in an Academy Aston Martin, but just as Cowley and Albert had needed to learn their car’s relative race strengths under competition conditions, so too did Will.
The team left Snetterton with a couple of solid mid-field finishes, which were enough for Cowley to retain his fourth place in
GT4 overall and Silver Cup positions, with Academy holding third in the team standings.
The season finale at Silverstone came exceptionally late in the year and brought out a full 38-car grid, including all manner of additional single-race entries and a clutch of GTC (Challenge and Cup) Ferraris and Porsches. GTC race pace is somewhere between GT3 and GT4 class lap times, meaning that the GT4 championship leaders had to contend with potential interference from that group and cope with more external factors playing a role in the championship outcomes. Sadly, the lockdown-busting elitesport status that allowed the race to run came with some caveats, and spectators were prohibited from attending this behind-closeddoors race. British GT fans had to make do with web-TV coverage, though media sponsor SKY televised the race as its new star driver, Jenson Button, made his British GT3 debut in the Jenson Team Rocket RJN McLaren 720S.
At Silverstone, things started well for Academy, with a combined qualifying time by Cowley and Moore fourth on a grid in which the top eight were all within the same second. The race on the following day saw the cruel arrival of another external event over which neither the team nor the drivers have any control. Contact on the second lap with another GT4 car meant a dash to the garage
to replace the front right corner suspension. The Academy team are lightning-fast but the work still put the car four laps down.
At times like this, true professionalism shows through and the team carried on to execute all of their pit stops within tenths of a second of their target time, and the drivers produced the fastest average GT4 race speed across the entire field.
In the end, despite only scoring from a single car, Academy finished fourth in the GT4 team championship against the two-car teams, and Matt Cowley held his fourth place in the GT4 Silver Cup drivers’ championship.
It was frustrating for everyone but the story doesn’t end there. Academy has been racing GT cars too long not to know when the ups and downs in a season are due to unpredictable external factors. Team principal Matt Nicoll-Jones is far too professional and experienced to dwell on what he can’t control, and so wanted to talk about the 2021 season.
“All the elements are in place: the car, the performance, the team, the drivers and the outstanding support from Multimatic. It was an exceptionally difficult year with many unknowns but I have never felt more ready to start a championship than now. The car is completely sorted and set-up ready for next year. My real frustration is the next four months up to the first race. Matt Cowley has fully blossomed as an Academy racer; his driving ability was never in question, we just needed to give him the opportunity to race. Will stepped in to support Matt’s championship bid, to race for Academy and to refine his own racing. His pace is amazing.”
For sure, there is a lot of external uncertainty still to play out, but the plan is to return to a two-Mustang entry in both the British GT Championship and the GT4 European Series. Academy Motorsport is in the right place and ready to race.