Beechdean and Newbridge hold the AMR mantel at Rd 3 of British GT at Donington Park
Monday, July 05, 2021
Blessed were we a couple of weeks ago in being able to attend the Championship’s blue riband event at Silverstone for the first time (since Media Day back at Snetterton in April 2020) where we had another sizeable grid of over thirty cars that made up the GT3 and GT4 classes with three Aston Martin Racing V8 Vantage GT3’s and a single AMR Vantage GT4 competing amongst them.
For this weekend we are back down to an entry list of just twenty-three cars including the two full season entries from both the Beechdean AMR team in GT3 and the Newbridge Motorsport team in GT4. The latter certainly stole the racing headlines at the #Silverstone500 with a debut Championship GT4 class win for driver Matt Topham and a first ever British GT class win for Darren Turner.
With Turner however pre-occupied this weekend at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, his position within the team’s certainly ‘differently’ liveried AMR GT4 will be taken by another Darren – Darren Burke, an experienced racer and Caterham driver coach.
With Turner however pre-occupied this weekend at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, his position within the team’s certainly ‘differently’ liveried AMR GT4 will be taken by another Darren – Darren Burke, an experienced racer and Caterham driver coach.
For the #27 car, their class win at Silverstone will come at the cost of having to cover off an additional 20 seconds at their expected single stop during this weekend’s two-hour race.
Back in GT3, the #7 Beechdean car of Andrew Howard and Jonny Adam had something of a frustrating affair at Silverstone after having Qualified in P7 only to finish one place higher by the end of the four-hour race. That result however, has still left the team third in the GT3 Pro-Am Championship just 4.5 points behind the joint leading Lamborghini crews so things are already tight at the top. Despite missing the first round of the year at Brands hatch, that class win (with extended points) for the #27 crew puts them up to P4 in their GT4 Pro-Am Championship table.
This round will also continue with its limited public admission with just 4000 pre-purchased tickets available before the weekend via the MSV website.
As ever, official sessions don’t begin until first Free Practice on Saturday before Qualifying later in the afternoon. The race itself starts at 12:45 (local) on Sunday and is of course streamed live on the Championship’s social media channels.
