Speedshow
the British Grand Prix meeting at Silverstone in England. Mitch Evans won the feature race in GP2 – the category immediately below Formula One – and Richie Stanaway won the GP3 sprint race.
Aucklander Evans, now 20, won the GP3 championship in 2012, and is in his second season of GP2. Coming into Silverstone, his best result this year had been a fourth in the sprint race at the Austrian GP. At Silverstone he qualified third for the feature race, which takes place on the Saturday of a Formula 1 weekend.
Evans said his Russian Time team had made a breakthrough in finding a good setup for that allimportant qualifying session.
“Qualifying’s been a weak point for us during the season for a number of reasons, but we just haven’t found the sweet spot all year for that,” he said. “In free practice this morning it was heading that way again, we weren’t too competitive, but we kind of turned the car on its head for qualifying.”
Pole went to Ferrari Academy driver Raffaele Marciello, who – like many of the leading singleseater drivers in Europe – has raced in New Zealand’s Toyota Racing Series, while championship leader Jolyon Palmer was second-fastest.
The GP2 cars are identical mechanically, and are very serious machinery. The four-litre, normally aspirated V8 puts out 456kW, the minimum weight including driver is 688kg, maximum speed is 332km/h, and acceleration from zero to 200km/h takes just 6.6 seconds. The six-speed sequential Hewland gearbox is operated by a paddle shift on the steering wheel. Drivers who win here are strong candidates to move up into F1.
The feature race was run in damp conditions, making it difficult for teams to choose the best strategy. The format for the feature race includes a compulsory pit stop to change tyres, and during the race each car must use the two different types of slicks: the prime and the option, which is softer and therefore has more grip, but will not last as long. Teams had to make educated guesses as to when to take the pit stop, and whether to run the options first or second.
Marciello seized the lead from the start, making the most of his pole position, and pulled away as he had elected to start on the grippier option tyres, while Palmer and Evans had fitted the primes. Evans got past Palmer on the first lap to grab second, but later made a mistake that allowed the British driver back in front of him. Then Marciello car stopped with a mechanical failure, and Evans was now battling for the lead with Palmer.
When Palmer made his pit stop, Evans stayed out for one more lap and put in an extra effort to make that lap as fast as possible. His team pulled off a particularly quick pit stop, and he came out just in for a little while till his tyres came up to operating temperature, but then he was able to draw away and record his breakthrough first victory in GP2. That lifted him to fourth in the championship.
“The last 18 months have been really tricky for us, for me and my family, and it’s a huge relief for everything to come together finally for my first win in GP2,” Evans said. “It’s been far too long, but I’m really, really happy to finally get the monkey off my back, and hopefully it’s not the last one of the season!
“After Jolyon got me I got into a good rhythm and was able to stay with the guys and have a crack when it came to the pit stop. Fortunately the guys gave me a good car and I was able to stay with Jolyon and make it work, and had a great pit stop from the guys, which has been a bit of an Achilles heel for us.”
The Russian Time team has new staff this year, following a management change. The new crew members have come from the iSport outfit, which pulled out of GP2 at the start of last year.
The sprint race on the Sunday starts with the top eight from race one in reverse order, so Evans was down to eighth on the grid. Overtaking is difficult at one spot, to finish seventh.
Evans and his family are well known to New Zealand fans. His father Owen was a fast driver of turbo Porsches, and his older brother Simon is a leading driver in V8 SuperTourers.
Mitch Evans twice won the Toyota Racing Series, and he has also won the New Zealand Grand Prix. He has enjoyed considerable financial support from the Giltrap Group, and has benefitted from mentoring by former F1 driver Mark Webber.
Stanaway, 22, and originally from Tauranga, is less well-known in New Zealand because after winning the Formula Ford championship he headed off to Europe at a young age. He was very successful in Germany, dominating a lower-level championship, and then winning the German F3 championship.
He was picked up by the Lotus team, who placed him in its young driver development programme and a seat in the high-level Formula Renault 3.5 championship. Stanaway might well have been on the way to Formula 1, but in mid-2012 he suffered a big crash in the wet at Spa, when a slow car suddenly materialised from the the spray in front of him. The Kiwi's car flew through the air and landed heavily, breaking vertebrae in his back.
After fighting his way back to fitness Stanaway again established himself as a rising star, and gained a place in Aston Martin’s GT team. This year he is also contesting the GP3 championship with the Status GP team, and has also made a temporary return to Formula Renault 3.5 with Lotus, filling in for an injured driver and finishing third in the Moscow race.
At Silverstone Stanaway qualified only seventh and finished in that position in Saturday’s feature race. That gave him a front-row start for Sunday’s sprint race, and he made full use of it, seizing the initial lead as pole-sitter Dino Zamparelli bogged down at the start.
Emil Bernstorff challenged the Kiwi Briefly, but Stanaway held on, and then Bernstorff came under attack from Stanaway’s team-mate Nick Yelloly. Yelloly got past and stayed close to the leader, but could not mount a serious challenge so Stanaway won his second GP3 race, and his first for 2014.
“It was an awesome day for us, obviously a one-two for the team, which is perfect,” Stanaway said. “We have really turned the car around and quite radically different to where we’ve been already this year. It’s working for usm and we’ve got it to where we need to be. We had a messy qualifying which kind of ruined our Saturday as we were pretty quick for the majority of the session, but we got messed up when the track dried up.
“Today I had a brilliant start and got into the lead. I had a bit of pressure from Emil on the first lap, but I was pretty desperate to stay in the lead. I haven’t won a race in three years, and it’s been pretty frustrating to go that long without winning a race.
“We have been very consistent, and I think we can start to smash it out of the park in the middle phase of the year,” Stanaway said. He then held third in the championship, 20 points behind British driver Alex Lynn.
A third Kiwi also shone at Silverstone. Earl bamber from Wanganui, a one-time member of New Zealand’s A1GP team, claimed third in the Porsche Supercup race, maintaining his second position in the series.