« back to the sponsorship home page

Snetterton Race Report - 7th & 8th June

Early June in Norfolk and the British GT Championship returns to Snetterton in Norfolk for a flat out blast round the old world war two aerodrome – It’s a fast place , a very fast place in a 300 + bhp GT car !!!!

June is meant to be all about warm summer days , but in Norfolk over the weekend it was anything but , and the rain which had dogged the previous meeting at Rockingham followed the GT cars relentlessly.

It started to rain on Friday morning as the Drive Assist backed RPM team turned up ………and literally did not stop until Sunday morning !!!!!

The Drive Assist Ginetta G50 had tested the previous week at an equally wet Thruxton in Hampshire , so our knowledge of the car in the wet was extensive !!! – Testing on the Friday went really well , even though it was so wet that some cars were aquaplaning even on the straights !!

The first race on Saturday showed the Drive Assist car to be well set up for such terrible conditions – Lead driver Phil Bailey started the first stint and excelled in the atrocious weather , leading the race for some time whilst never falling below third place – Things were going really well ….until an incident brought the safety car out just around the time of the pit stop window; At this point the Drive Assist car was leading its class , but an unfortunate decision by the team resulted in the RPM car staying out a lap too long , and in doing so immediately dropped a lap in the process !!! – Thus a probable third or even second place became a disappointing 5th place , although a fourth fastest race lap just 7/10ths slower than the fastest lap helped to ease the pain a little !! – the person in the pits responsible for the decision to stay out is currently on his way to a camp in Siberia !!!!!!!!

Sunday dawned dry and very hot , but this created its own problems with the car only having run in the wet all weekend until that point !! – The 10 minute warm up in the morning was very little time in which to find a good dry set up and this came back to haunt the team later in the day in the race.

Within a few minutes of the start , driver Steve Tandy radioed in to say he had handling problems even though he had started on new tyres !! – The result was he steadily fell away from the tail of the field before handing over to Phil Bailey.

It was soon apparent that this was going to be a long , hard stint with the car suffering from a severe lack of grip – However Phil battled away catching a few cars which resulted in a 7 th place finish – Not what was wanted !!!

So , now there is a two week gap until the next race in Hampshire at the even faster Thruxton circuit – Hopefully a test before then will get to the bottom of the current handling issues !!!!