British GT Championship: Donington Puncture
Puncture denies Lamborghini Factory Driver Sandy, win at Donington, but former champ takes British GT battle to thrilling finale with Black Bull and Barwell.
Lamborghini factory driver and former champ Sandy will take the battle for the 2024 British GT Championship to the final round at Brands Hatch later this month after a puncture denied him the win in the latest two-hour race at Donington Park. Sandy, the 24-year-old from Forfar, looked on as his team-mate Alex Martin started their No 78 Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo2, prepared by Barwell Motorsport, from third on the 35-car grid. With their closest championship rivals, the sister #63 Barwell Lamborghini starting from pole position, both cars safely negotiated the first corner while incidents happened behind them.
The two Barwell cars then opened up a significant gap over the third-placed car with Martin comfortably holding position, just a few seconds behind the #63 Lamborghini, knowing it had to serve an extra 15-second time penalty following the result in the previous outing at Snetterton.
But with an hour and 16 minutes of the race remaining, and 18 minutes before the mandatory pitstop window, the #78 Lamborghini suffered a puncture.
“Alex was comfortably holding position with Rob, which meant we would have leapfrogged them when they served their extra 15-second success penalty,” Sandy, personally-backed by Huntly-based Black Bull Scotch Whisky and Tunnocks, explained. “But then unfortunately Alex just clipped the tyre bale at the chicane which caused a puncture. It was really unlucky because the impact was quite small, but it must have just hit the wrong bit of it to cause the puncture. So we had to come in for a quick unscheduled pitstop to change the front-left wheel.”
The extra pitstop relegated Martin to sixth, but he immediately set his own personal best lap of the race and when he pitted to hand the car over to Sandy with 58 minutes remaining he had recovered to fifth. He rejoined the race in sixth and rapidly caught the fifth-placed #6 Porsche. But the Scot’s progress was stymied by the actions of the Porsche’s sister car, the #18 Mercedes which, despite being two laps down, found itself sandwiched between the two cars racing for position. “It was a bit cheeky for the team to use the Mercedes as a rear gunner when he was being shown blue flags for a number of laps,” Sandy said, “but sometimes that’s the way it goes.”
The Scot eventually managed to pass both cars to move up to fifth and, following a lengthy full course yellow and Safety Car period, to allow for repairs to a tyre barrier following an incident, Sandy moved up to fourth when the #8 Mercedes suffered a late problem. “Obviously it’s not the result we wanted, but given where we were at one stage, to finish fourth is a positive,” stated Sandy, whose result, allied to that of the sister #63 Lamborghini which won the race, clinched the Teams’ Championship for Barwell with a round to spare. “Sealing the Team title for Barwell with one round to go is nice, but the result means we’re now 24.5-points behind the leaders in the Drivers’ Championship. There’s 37.5-points for the winner of the final round at Brands Hatch. We go there with no success penalties, while the #63 car will have to serve an extra 20-seconds at its pitstop. We just need to go for it in the last round, try to win the race and hope the other results work in our favour.”