SOLID SATURDAY PLACES MATTY WELL FOR BRITISH GT FINALE
Matty starts the final race of the 2016 British GT season from fourth on the GT4 grid and 15th overall, following a highly encouraging day of practice and qualifying at Donington Park on Saturday.
The 20 year old and team mate Jack Mitchell were on the pace across all of the on track running during the opening day of the meeting and used that to secure a second row start for Sunday’s two hour endurance race.
Heavy overnight rain that continued into the morning meant that the first of the day’s practice sessions was of little use, in terms of contributing to preparing for a race forecast to be run in the dry, however it did provide an opportunity for the drivers to reacquaint with both the car and the circuit.
Under instructions from the team not to push in order to avoid any costly and unnecessary accidents, the pair were still able to steadily improve over the course of the hour, ending the session as the third fastest GT4 entry thanks to Matty’s lap of 1:51.688.
While the rain stopped falling, the track remained soaked during second practice necessitating further exploratory running ahead of the afternoon qualifying sessions, with Matty and Jack again building pace across the session.
Their growing confidence saw both improve on their morning lap times, with Matty’s again being the number 42 Macmillan Racing car’s best effort, with a 1:50.360 towards the end of the session.
With the majority of the Donington Park lap dry by the time the GT4 qualifying sessions got underway, it was a step into the unknown for the whole field, but one that Graham rose to, finding time all the way through his 10 minute segment to finish second, only two hundredths off the fastest car in the group.
With grid positions set by the combined times of a car’s two drivers, that was only a provisional placing and while Mitchell was challenging at the sharp end, a small moment on the entry to the Foggerty esses prevented him from posting a time that could have secured a front row start.
But having made a lightening start from the same position at the series last meeting in August, both drivers will be confident of challenging on Sunday.
“It was raining pretty badly this morning and the track was really wet, so having not ran a lot in the wet this year I was a pretty apprehensive as to where our pace was going to be, but I felt really comfortable in the car, it was really fast and we were consistently in that top end of the order.
“For the qualifying it has completely dried up so we then had to adapt again to that after doing no dry running, but again, I was really fast out of the box, missed out on P1 by a fraction and had a fairly big gap back to third so for me it was a really good session.
“I was a little bit gutted not to be fastest, when you are as close as that then you just go through everything in your head that you could have done to find that fraction of time, but I’m still pleased with my session and the race pace should be good for Sunday, as it had been all season.”
Sunday’s race gets underway from 1pm on Sunday afternoon, with live coverage on Motors TV.