Racing News

23-Sep-09

Piranha British GT

Our first race at Brands Hatch was quite a baptism of fire. With no previous testing due to two catastrophic engine failures thankfully proven to be of no fault of ours or Lotus but that of a recently rebuilt by the manufacturer component failing, we had quite an uphill weekend. So our first ever race meeting as Piranha Motorsport and with the Lotus 211 GT4 was not how we would normally prepare for a Motorsport.

Friday testing was cut short to just 1 hour of practice for myself and team mate Chris Bialan when a damaged suspension component was found in the pre race prep. In the circumstances of a rushed second engine fit in the few days prior its an understandable if annoying glitch. So, having only driven the car for about 30 minutes at Snetterton on worn Elise trophy tyres we went straight in with new Avon slicks and load of guess work on set up.

I qualified the car only 1 tenth slower than GT4 championship winning Ginetta G50 of Nigel Moore. I was very pleased with this in the circumstances. Chris was snapping at Nigel’s team mate in the other qualifying session so we knew a good race was on the cards. Sadly that wasn’t to be.

Chris had a great opening stint in race 1 and took the GT4 lead from G50 driver Jody Firth with a great manoeuvre and then stayed cool to hold the lead despite our car being significantly slower in the mid corners. We lost the lead on the pit stop however, something we will have to work hard on. I took over and proceeded to match Nigel Moore until 7 laps in when I was taken out by an obviously out of his depth Aston Martin DBRS 9 driver who lost control into Druids and over shot the corner locked up and fired our poor little Lotus into the gravel. The worst thing was all the effort our crew had put into getting the car ready the days before. Now they had another late night and they deserved an early one!

Russell Gibbons from Lotus was a star and drove back to Hethel that night to collect the spares required to rebuild our rear suspension. We missed warm up whilst we set the car up.

With nothing to loose we made a significant set up change for race two. It didn’t work! My times were typically .5 off the previous day and loosing around 2 tenths a lap thereafter as the car became more and more leery and tyre pressures sky rocketed. Chris took over and drove brilliantly to hold onto the car and get our first ever race finish, 2nd in GT4.

I must thank everyone at Lotus Sport for their help in the week leading up the race with all our engine wows but, most of all, Russell Gibbons who was an exceptional bonus to our first race meeting. Our crew of Number 1 mechanic/engineer Ed Cobb, Will Garbutt and Patrick Buss were simply brilliant and I couldn’t be more happy with how the team has gelled in such a short time. Finally I must thank Chris Bialan who has been so patient and supportive in what has been a very stressful few weeks leading up to the race for both of us.

Looking to the future we are now very keen to run a Lotus 211 team in British GT4 next season with GT Cup and the Lotus Eurocup also possible but that will very much depend on the interest we receive for a given series.