The 20-year-old Porsche Carrera Cup GB champion reflects on his title-winning year
Sealing the Porsche Carrera Cup GB championship last month at Brands Hatch, in race one of the season-closer meeting’s double header, was a very strange scenario. I had done all the hard work at Silverstone, the penultimate round, to set ourselves up for a good Brands and then I was on pole position. I had a tough start to the race but I got straight back to the lead, and then for the race to be paused then finish under a red flag like that, with my main rival Will Martin having the crash he had, wasn’t the way I wanted it to finish. You have this picture in your head of coming across the line first, all the team across the pitwall. But it was very nice for it to all be over to sign off a good year.
The year also was very important for what happens next in my career. The season didn’t start great, in the first race I was in a gravel trap, but we bounced back very well and finished the year extremely fast.
It was extremely close between me and Martin. I got a bit excited after Snetterton in August, we ended up 13 points ahead which in this championship is a pretty big gap. But then we had a tough weekend at Thruxton and it brought it back down to the wire again, back to two points.
And then we headed to Silverstone, a very important weekend, and we hit the nail on the head: pole position, both race wins, fastest laps in both races, maximum points scored. And I was going to the Brands finale feeling very confident after having a nice gap but knowing that you’ve still got to do the job.
So to then be on pole by 0.3 seconds in a championship where it’s so close, for the team it was a great achievement. And then to win both races at Brands Hatch in class and to have both fastest laps to roll out the season with two maximum points-scoring weekends was just incredible.
For those last two rounds we changed the way we come into the weekend and we went for a different approach. That approach worked very very well so hopefully it’s something you can use in the future and it will work, not just in Porsches. And if it does it will be a vital tool.
Going from the 991 model to the 992 in Carrera Cup GB this year meant that my experience in the championship last year was to a certain extent thrown out of the window. But still doing a year already is a big advantage.
This year, apart from the first round, we had a little bit more luck on our side and the race pace was stronger. It is very very important to be picking up the fastest lap and pole position points in Carrera Cup, that’s what makes or breaks the championship and that’s what I missed out on last year. This year that was a target to improve on if we wanted to win and luckily all the hard work paid off.
No-one’s going to be slow at the front in Carrera Cup but the way my rivals started the season I was worried that halfway through the year they would get used to the car and championship more, but if anything it was us that found the extra bit.
The Porsche championship has always been very appealing to me, even when I was in single-seater racing. I raced in BRDC British Formula 3 in 2020, but we came to the agreement that it was better to take the second half of the year out to focus on 2021.
Even until April I wasn’t racing in 2021 and then Stuart Parker from Team Parker Racing came along and said ‘do you fancy racing a Porsche?’ I said ‘yeah sure’, I had nothing else and it was something like I said I wanted to do for a while. And having a good year in 2021 led us into staying with Team Parker and going for the main title in 2022.
We’re not totally sure yet what we’re doing next year, we’ll see what we can bring together sponsor wise and making it work. My ultimate ambition is to become a paid driver; you want to be a factory driver. It would be great for it to be for Porsche, it would be nice to follow through on what we’ve done so far, but we’ll see what happens.
“We changed the way we come into the weekend; hopefully it will be a vital tool”