The heat is on

Marcus Short had plenty to learn on his GB4 debut. And the biggest hurdle was warming the single-seater’s tyres. His dad Martin explains: “To emphasise how green he was, it was taking him 20 minutes to get the tyres into the heat window and the qualifying session was only 15 minutes long. And every session I was going ‘right he’s going to do it [the warm up], he’s going to do it, nope, he’s not done it’.

“So before qualifying, I’ve got a little Toyota Yaris GR, I took him out of the circuit in that and I said ‘this is how you warm the tyres up’. And we hurtled up the road with me weaving violently from side to side, accelerating and braking, accelerating and braking.

“Richard Ollerenshaw’s [Hillspeed boss] wet himself when I told him about it because he imagines Marcus banging one side of the car to the other, which is what we were doing. And with that he went out and did it.”

Marcus adds: “My team-mates were telling me they didn’t find how to work the tyres until about three rounds in, but once you find it [the window] then you know how to do it. But it’s so tricky to find that perfect slot, and I just didn’t have enough time.”