BRANDS HATCH THRILLER SHAKES UP BRITISH GT TITLE RACE
Adam and Davidson mount pressure on Barwell Motorsport duo.
Jonny Adam and Graham Davidson were 54 points off the British GT championship lead and seemingly out of contention following a disastrous late retirement at Silverstone. But the TF Sport Aston Martin pairing’s victory at Brands Hatch, their second in the last three races, has thrust them right back into the equation.
They now sit just six points behind Barwell Motorsport’s Phil Keen and Adam Balon heading to Donington Park, three times the scene of triple champion Adam’s coronation and the track where he and Davidson launched their fightback by converting pole position in June.
Although Spa winner Ollie Wilkinson made the best start, swooping around the outside of polesitter Shaun Balfe’s Mclaren 720S into Paddock Hill Bend, it was Davidson’s move on Balfe around the outside of Druids that was to decide the race.
“It’s a bit of a cliche, ‘do or die’, but I really want
to win this championship and I knew I had to pull off something special,” said Davidson.
And pull it off he did. Wilkinson, who had a 20-second success penalty hanging over him, initially pulled out a gap of five seconds in as many laps, but Davidson gradually closed in and was just 1.5s behind when the Optimum Aston driver rotated at Paddock Hill.
That dropped Wilkinson to fourth behind
Balfe and the Century Motorsport BMW of GT3 debutant Angus Fender, who passed pre-event championship leader Sam De Haan at Hawthorn on the opening lap but, despite wrapping up the Silver Cup title, Wilkinson and Bradley Ellis were never a factor thereafter and finished a lowly 11th.
Davidson managed his advantage over Balfe after a safety car following Glynn Geddie’s tangle with Ben Hurst’s GT4 Aston at Westfield and, with no pitstop success penalty carried over from Spa, Adam simply had to tick off the laps, never coming under threat from Balfe’s co-driver Rob Bell.
“We needed this,” said Adam. “We had a gameplan this weekend to win, we had to for the championship.”
Bell’s hopes of giving the 720S its first series win were torpedoed by the timing of the second safety car for debris at Stirlings.
A sea of GT4 cars between him and Adam meant the Scot was already five seconds clear when they restarted on lap 42 and Bell was seven seconds in arrears by the time he had cleared the traffic, a deficit that remained to the flag.
“We had a big bit of luck on our side today,” Adam admitted. “There was a good six GT4 cars between me and Rob at the safety car restart, that gave us more of a gap than it was before.”
Bell was put under pressure for much of his stint by Fender’s co-driver Jack Mitchell, the reigning GT4 champion having his best showing since Snetterton despite running an extra 30 kilos as a Silver-silver pairing. But as the weight told on his tyres, Mitchell slipped back into the clutches of a mammoth train of cars headed by the squabbling Barwell Lamborghinis of Jonny Cocker (in for De Haan, who had struggled with a slow puncture resulting from a leaking valve during his stint) and Keen, with the GT3 train stretching all the way back to Callum Macleod in 10th.
Balon had slipped as low as 11th in the early laps, but gradually picked his way forward. He capitalised on contact between Ian Loggie and Dominic Paul at Clearways, then passed Richard Neary’s Team ABBA Mercedes and Rick Parfitt’s JRM Bentley before handing over to Keen, who appeared quicker than Cocker but was unable to find an opening. That is, until the last lap, when following a call to hold station, Keen pounced on Cocker getting an average exit from Surtees and swept around the outside at Hawthorn.
Cocker contested the corner and was forced to back off, which left him vulnerable into Westfield. In a flash, he tumbled another three places to Dennis Lind (WPI Lambo), Tom Onslow-cole (ABBA Merc) and Nicki Thiim (TF Aston) and had gone from leading the points standings to third in one fell swoop. A tense Barwell debrief followed,
but afterwards Keen defended his move. “He’s the leader of the championship, we needed to beat him,” Keen said. “It’s a shame we couldn’t get past [earlier] and go because I think we’d have caught the leaders, but Jonny was driving well.”
The intra-barwell controversy risked overshadowing Mitchell and Fender giving Century its first podium with the M6, but after a trying season in which he has had four different co-drivers, the significance certainly wasn’t lost on Mitchell.
“It’s not been an easy year with the new car, loads of different team-mates, trying to find the sweet spot in the set-up, it’s been very hard work,” he said. “It’s a relief finally to get the result,
I think it was needed for all of us.”
Relieved though he might be, it wasn’t a candle to Davidson, whose championship fight lives on for another weekend.
“We’ve been catching for a long time now,” he said. “I hope it’s not too little, too late.”
Now the pressure really is on.