It was a very bright and sometimes very breezy start to the official business of the British GT Championship today from Donington Park where most of the original twenty sex runners did at least continue from where they had left off after Media Day at Silverstone a few weeks ago and private testing on Thursday.
For the three Aston Martin Racing powered teams, it was very much business as usual as the #7 Blackthorn AMR Vantage GT3 of Giacoma Petrobelli and Jonny Adam started they second chase of the Pro-Am title whilst the #97 Beechdean AMR Vantage GT3 of Andrew Howard and local gun Tom Wood were again running within the smaller Silver-Am class.
The #50 MKH Racing AMR Vantage GT4 of Peter Montague and Stuart Hall are this time the sole AMR representation within the GT4 and only then within the Endurance Cup rounds of the Championship (all except rounds with two sprint races) – very disappointing but a notable trend within many series this season.
Anyhow, after this morning’s Free Practice and Pre-Qualifying, there were not notable events that affected any of these three except the deletion of lap times for exceeding track limits for the #50 car and possible a slight kiss from the #7 car to the car in front (tell-tale bodywork damage), so all was good going into this afternoons individual Qualifying sessions.
Out first were both Petrobelli and Howard where the Italian made good his intent from media day to post a time quick enough for P3 whilst Howard was further back in P12 (P2 in class) at the end of their ten-minute stint. Next out where their opposite numbers where even the likes of Adam could only achieve a best time worthy of P8 overall, despite being two seconds quicker than Petrobelli which aggregated them a starting position of P5 overall for tomorrows two-hour opener.
Local racer Wood (and Howard) would go onto get an early haul of class honours as his best lap time of just one tenth behind that of Adam was enough to lift the #97 crew up to P12 overall and pole position in class.
That left just the #50 MKH Racing crew to do their part where both Montague and Hall set about their first full season qualifying session apiece to earn themselves a P12 overall – P2 in class to end the day.
Tomorrows forecast appears to be much of the same from today – very bright, perhaps a degree or too cooler but with also a little bit less wind speed to help them all on their way through morning warm up and into the start of the race at 12:45hrs local.