GINETTA JUNIOR CHAMPIONSHIP
Ginetta Junior is the UK’s highest-profile junior championship, with its packed frenetic races taking pride of place on the British Touring Car Championship package and getting exposure on ITV’s allSunday television coverage.
This year the Ginetta Junior championship has 25 races, with most meetings squeezing in three contests.
And there are reasons for Ginetta Junior’s popularity. “The racing’s so close, it gets you to learn quicker,” championship coordinator
Steph Bush tells Motorsport News. “You pick things up quicker because of the sheer amount of races and the ability to learn and adapt to every situation; we go from being a race with absolutely no incidents to maybe multiple red flags, safety cars, yellow flags, all sorts of stuff.”
Since Ginetta Junior launched in 2011 it has Formula 1 star Lando Norris among its pupils, along with Jamie Chadwick and Tom Ingram.
And the star names, plus the range of places they end up, is likely not a coincidence.
“Most people are saying once you can learn in a [Ginetta] Junior car you’re pretty much set up for life in terms of racing,” Bush adds. “It can develop you into anything.”
The championship’s G40 car also aids development. “It’s a great first car,” Bush explains “You’re topped at 100bhp, it’s fairly light, 830kg. It’s not the easiest thing to drive, a lot of juniors will jump into a Supercup car and be like ‘this is well easy compared to the Junior’, but it really hones their skills.
“It’s a little bit more forgiving [than quicker cars], but it really makes you adapt as a driver from karting. It’s not too quick, it’s quick enough to learn, you’re not getting too much from the car in terms of help.”
But the flipside of all this is that Ginetta is the most expensive of the UK’s junior championships, with an annual budget of around £100,000150,000, including a car and depending on testing.
There is however some mitigation as Ginetta Junior also holds an annual scholarship contest, wherein more than 60 drivers complete for a place on the following season’s grid.
Ginetta Junior’s ITV exposure also helps raising sponsor budget. “We have got a really great platform to offer that from ITV,” Bush says, “we have our sim, we have our test track, we have hospitality on site, we’ve got multiple chances for drivers of across all boards to deal with their sponsors and offer things that [are] not very common, it is a massive thing.”