Adam/Davidson back to where they left off in British GT

Donington Park is teeing itself up for another highly exciting round of the British GT Championship tomorrow as TF Sport's GT3 drivers Jonny Adam and Graham Davidson pick up from (nearly) where they left off last time out at Silverstone to claim another front row start.

With several drivers from the AMR camp running straight off the back of last weekends Le Mans 24 Hour event, it was no surprise really that Nicki Thiim was immediately the fastest runner out of the bag during FP1 in his #2 TF Sport car that he shares with Mark Farmer to then just luck out a little to the same accolade in FP2.


In GT4, the seven Aston Martin Racing V8 Vantage runners from TF Sport, Optimum and Academy started showing that the performance of Silverstone was not luck - especially for the #35 and #75 Optimum cars as they completed the top five GT4's along with etc #11 Beechdean GT4 of Pro-Am leaders Martin Plowman and Kelvin Fletcher during FP1. That transposed into FP2 for those cars except for the #97 TF Sport car of Ash Hand and Tom Canning stealing their march to claim top AMR slot in P4 as the teams then prepared for Qualifying.

Being a single race tomorrow both drivers were again required to submit their own time from which the aggregated times would be used to determine their starting position.


With the GT3 Am drivers out first, Graham Davidson again proved that his is a gentleman driver of worth by posting a lap time that even his AMR factory co-driver Jonny Adam could only go onto beat by little over one second to end up claiming overall pole position, putting the demons of the last lap at Silverstone firmly behind them.

Making his return to the national GT championship, AMR reserve factory driver Ross Gunn also put in his best laps to be the fastest Pro driver in their respective Qualifying session that would help elevate the #99 car he shares with Andrew Howard to a P6 start. Whilst the #96 Silver Cup entry from Optimum for Ollie Wilkinson and Bradley Ellis remained a constant force in their class to qualify P7 overall and first in class,  slower times from Farmer dropped his #2 car down to P8 (the lowest AMR in the GT3 field) despite the best attempts of Thiim.


Back into GT4 again and again consistency was again the name of the game with the #11 Beechdean car being steady through both Am (P5) and Pro (P7) sessions to an overall P6 in GT4 (P2 in class). Some fantastically fast laps from Micah Stanley in his #61 Academy car posted him initially to P8 in his class although co driver Ben Hurst was unable to reciprocate that in the Pro session for them to end up P19 overall.


Despite early promises at the Silverstone 500 two weeks ago, both TF Sport GT4's have been uncharacteristically up and down over the course of events so far at Donington with the #97 car P9 and the #95 in P13. Both Optimum GT4's of Patrik Matthiesen/Mike Robinson and Jack Butel/Connor O'Brien split the 'yellow perils' with P11 and P12 starting positions respectively.


The weather forecast for tomorrow sees similar temperatures of today but maybe without as much visibility of the blue skies of today. With the usual ten minute warm up for the BGT cars tomorrow morning, Sundays two hour race will start at 13:10hrs.

With the circuit at Donington being more recently used to determine a winner or two at the end of the season with its #doningtondecider label, we can be assured that whatever the weather there will be some epic battles in both classes around the 2.5 mile track.

Photo credits - Jacob Ebrey