Determined final charge in season sees Jason Bell claim the GT4 GT America crown at Indianapolis finale

Unlike the Newbridge Aston Martin Racing team in the UK who enjoyed a points advantage going into their final round of the British GT Championship, the other Championship winning display this weekend came from the GMG Racing team competing at the final round of the GT America Series from Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Since swapping to the AMR Vantage GT4 in readiness for the 2021 season, American Jason Bell has been running a joint programme with two AMR Vantage GT4’s in each of the SRO sanctioned GT4 America and GT America Series.

Racing under the guidance of his resident driver coach and co-driver Andrew Davis, a recent string of high end or podium finishes left Bell within arm’s length of the overall class prize going into the final round at Indianapolis but would need to overcome a fourteen points deficit to the class leading BMW M4 GT4 of Sean Quinlan to do so first.

Racing solo for the bronze ranked drivers only as the series demands, a fiery Bell made the move of his GT America season at the restart to race one on Friday where he quickly claimed the GT4 class lead from Quinlan after a brief caution and went on to claim another class win after that forty-minute race. His result and Gray Newell stealing additional championship points by taking P2 in class in his Heart of Racing AMR cut the points deficit to just five points going into Saturday’s finale.

With fastest laps in race 1 again setting the grid for race 2, Bell already had in theory an early jump on Quinlan by starting one row ahead of where the BMW driver should have started had Quinlan not have suffered technical issues on the warmup lap. Pitting before the race had even begun and his race effectively over, all the #119 BMW could do then was to hope for a none points scoring finish from the #2 Aston Martin.

For this cruel end to Quinlan’s season, that was not to be as Bell pushed for an early class lead with Newell in hot pursuit and with Sean Whalen in only his second GT America meeting aboard his #888 Zelus Motorsport Aston.

Giving nothing away to his class opponent, AMR stablemate Newell passed Bell for the class lead near the halfway mark of the race from which the #25 never looked back as his first solo class win beckoned him home. For Bell (and like Topham and Turner in the UK), P2 was enough for him to claim the GT America GT4 crown as the eighteen points for second far outweighed the five points deficit to the Cameron Racing BMW team.

Photo credits – GT America / Team / CSJ Motorsport / F Lagunas