We went into the penultimate round of the British GT Championship at Brands Hatch GP last weekend with a healthy points lead, after winning the last race at Spa-Francorchamps. However, in British GT such success comes with a price, as you carry forward a 20-second time handicap (for 2 hour races) to be added on to your pit stop at the next round. With this in mind, we thus approached Brands with the target of completing the best ‘damage limitation’ exercise that we could, also given that this was the strongest track for the Aston Martin cars fielded by our two main rivals in the title chase. After great drives from both Marco Attard and Alexander Sims we exceeded our expectations, claiming a hard fought fourth position in the Ecurie Ecosse powered by Black Bull BMW Z4 GT3, and actually increasing our championship lead with one round to go at Donington in two weeks. With two of our title rivals falling by the wayside at Brands, the only challenger remaining is the Oman Racing Team Aston of Al Harty/Caine, which now has to win at Donington no matter what, with us finishing lower than sixth place, if they are to prevent us from being crowned 2014 British GT Champions. Meanwhile Ecurie Ecosse are still in the Teams’ title reckoning, albeit 12 points and a car short of leaders Oman Racing Team.
During free practice and qualifying the engineers and drivers of the Barwell Motorsport-run BeeEm had to work extremely hard to try and extract the most performance possible from the Z4, at a circuit which seemed to favour the Astons and Porsches. In a tightly-bunched top 10 group, during the two qualifying sessions Alexander posted the fourth fastest time in the Pro session with Marco the eighth fastest Am, the combined result of these giving us eighth on the grid for Sunday’s two-hour encounter, our car proving to be the quickest of the four BMWs present.
Marco made a great start to immediately move up to sixth during the opening lap, during which he passed one of our main championship rivals, the factory Aston Martin Racing Beechdean car of Howard/Adam which had been on pole position but was now struggling for pace with a suspected rear brake problem. Attard then hung on to the three cars in front as they ran in close quarters down from third place, as he put in consistently fast lap times whilst also monitoring the threat of the Trackspeed Porsche behind him. This gaggle of cars then got split up when they started to lap the GT4 field after eight laps, the biggest loser being the factory Aston of Colin White/Tom Sharp which got squeezed off the circuit by an errant GT4 machine, thus promoting Marco up to fifth spot.
He then got his head down and pulled away from the pack behind him , building up a useful gap to the midfield group so that our 20-second time handicap at the pit stop would not drop us too far down the order. Unfortunately all of Marco’s hard work was undone around 40 minutes into the race when the Safety Car was called out whilst a stricken car was cleared off the circuit. This wiped out all the gap Marco had built up, but it looked like he would have another three or four racing laps to try again before his scheduled stop to hand over to Alexander. Sadly this was not to be, as the race went green again only for a matter of seconds before another stranded car brought the Safety Car out once more. After this Marco had a single lap left before heading pitward and handing the reins over to young GT star Sims. With the car sitting stationary in the pits for what seemed like an eternity after we had changed the tyres and refuelled, eventually Alexander re-joined the fray in 12th position, but with a few cars still left to take their pit stops.
Alexander then immediately made an impact on the race by setting its fastest lap, as he commenced what was to be another epic charge up through the field. He made short work of the Triple 8 BMW Z4 of Mowle/Ratcliffe before hunting down the factory Aston of World Touring Car star, Alex Macdowall, and passing him a few laps later with a clever move at Westfield bend. With 32 laps of the 77-lap race left everyone had made their mandatory stops and the Ecurie Ecosse Z4 was now up to seventh place, with quite a large gap up to two cars disputing fifth position. Whilst making sure he didn’t get tripped up by the unpredictable GT4 backmarkers, it took Sims less than 10 laps to catch the Strata 21 Aston of Tom Onslow-Cole, who was queued up behind the Ferrari of AF Corse works driver, Matt Griffin. He then quickly slipped past Onslow-Cole and started to apply the pressure to the fifth-placed AF Corse Ferrari. At this stage we knew the Beechdean Aston – previously our closest title rival – was a lap down and not going to score any points, and we were already in a decent points-scoring position, hence we didn’t need to take any risks in trying to pass the Ferrari.
Sims thus played it perfectly, keeping the pressure on Griffin but not forcing him to defend too hard, which meant they could both keep up a reasonable pace and not allow the cars behind to get too close. As the race wore on, however, the Ferrari was clearly struggling more and more for rear-end grip, and Griffin made a small mistake going through Dingle Dell corner and ran wide on the exit. In an instant Alexander was all over him, forcing him to defend into the following left at Stirlings, and he then pulled off an absolute classic move. Sims was right on the rear bumper of the Ferrari as they hammered down towards the fast Clearways right-hander that leads onto the start/finish straight. With Griffin forced to defend on the inside, Alexander switched back to the racing line just before they turned in to the corner, got on the power early and as Griffin struggled for traction on the exit he cut across the back of him and took the inside line and his extra momentum swept the BMW past its Italian rival. Fifth place was as far as we could get with six laps remaining, but we then benefitted from the misfortune of the leading Porsche of Minshaw/Keen as it suffered a puncture and put us up to fourth place.
Marco Attard: “The highs and lows of motor racing! After a tough Saturday qualifying, Sunday could not have played out better whatever we had asked! My stint was tough with the GT4 traffic and trying to keep up with the leaders. Alexander drove an incredible race and just proved what a great asset he is to the team. As usual the team did a fantastic job and it was the 100% effort by everyone that got us this 4th place! Fantastic weekend and looking forward to Donington!”
Alexander Sims: “What an eventful weekend! A classic example of why you should never give up. Our pace wasn’t quite as good as we wanted but my god we fought hard! Marco put in a strong first stint to bring us up the order and give me as good a chance as possible. With the safety car just before the pit window however, it really made things difficult as we had the extra success penalty on the pit stop. I pushed as much as I could and had some great battles on my way to 4th by the end of the race. I’m so proud of all in the Ecurie Ecosse/Barwell team for their attitude in what could have been a difficult weekend. The bonus of some great racing with Alex MacDowall and Matt Griffin was the icing on the cake for me.”
Mark Lemmer, Barwell MD: “Fourth is the perfect result for us considering the 20 second success penalty. This allows us to go to the final round penalty-free, hopefully we can keep pushing and round off the season with another win.”