GB4 RIVALS COLLIDE IN THRILLING CONTESTS
The GB4 Championship provided its most exciting weekend to date at Silverstone, with drama in the title battle and two teams on the podium for the first time.
Hampered by poor starts at the opening two rounds, Fortec Motorsports’s Nikolas Taylor (leading above) made amends with a brace of wins. Points leader Alex Walker took pole for race one ahead of his Elite team-mate Jack Sherwood, but the latter made a poor getaway, allowing Taylor to claim second into Copse.
On the second lap, Walker tried to defend from Taylor on the Hamilton Straight but the latter squeezed into a small gap to the inside before completing the move into Abbey and then held his rival off until the end. Hillspeed’s Max Marzorati kept Fortec’s Elias Edestam at bay to record his fourth podium.
Marzorati grabbed the lead at the start of race two from Taylor, who then fought back on the Hangar Straight but they were both beaten into Stowe by Walker. Having reclaimed second, Taylor tried to retake the lead later in the lap around the outside at the Loop, but contact dropped him to fourth while Walker retired on the spot with suspension damage.
“I tried it around the outside,” said Taylor on his incident with Walker.
“He tried to push me wide and I couldn’t go anywhere.”
Taylor passed Tom Mills and Megan Gilkes following a brief safety car period and drew alongside Marzorati into Becketts, before Mills capitalised to sneak past the pair of them. But, hampered by straightline speed issues all weekend, Mills was unable to prevent Taylor from getting the lead back into Copse.
Mills’s team-mate Jarrod Waberski climbed from fifth to finish in second behind Taylor, while Marzorati scored another third place as Mills eventually limped home in ninth. “I’d say we can put it down as a character-building weekend,” he said. “We can’t find the problem, and we’ve been working so hard for it.”
Another driver suffering similar issues earlier in the weekend was Logan Hannah. An intercooler problem left her down on power in qualifying, but she bounced back to deliver Graham Brunton Racing’s best performance of the season in the full reversed-grid race.
Hannah grabbed the lead on lap one by sweeping past team-mate Chloe Grant into Becketts as series debutant Lucas Romanek was soon into second for Oldfield Motorsport. Grant was then involved in a three-car collision and dropped to the back having tried to defend against Waberski into Club, as an over-ambitious move up the inside from Taylor resulted in him being launched over Grant’s car, putting himself and Waberski out.
Hannah resisted pressure from Romanek until half-distance, but a small mistake exiting Chapel allowed the latter to sweep by at the end of the Hangar Straight and eventually win by two seconds. A first podium finish left Hannah delighted after a difficult start to the season, while Sherwood finished third.