Top five finish at British GT with Barwell Motorsport

Former Champ and Lamborghini Factory Driver, Scot Sandy Mitchell, bags top five British GT finish at Oulton Park with Barwell.

Sandy bagged a top five finish on his return to the British GT Championship at Oulton Park. The 25-year-old from Forfar looked on as his team-mate Alex Martin, in the No 78 Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo2 prepared by Barwell Motorsport, started the opening 60-minute race at the Cheshire track from sixth on the grid. In an action-packed opening corner, Martin did well to keep the Lamborghini moving forward after it was nudged left on to the grass by a rival Mercedes, dropping the #78 to seventh.

Sandy: “Alex did really well to rescue the car after the contact because he ended up bouncing through a lot of grass, dust and gravel,” Sandy, the 2020 British GT champ said. Having moved back up to sixth following a spin by a McLaren, Martin hounded the rear of the #8 Mercedes for around 10 minutes before the race was neutralised by a full course yellow following a incident involving a GT4 BMW with 38-minutes remaining.

Sandy: “Alex was really fast, but Oulton is a such a difficult circuit to overtake on because it’s so narrow,” Sandy, personally backed by Tunnocks, continued. Following the mandatory pitstop, Sandy rejoined the race in sixth place with 33-minutes remaining, but it was another 12-minutes before the race went green again following the removal of the damaged BMW. Over the closing 20-minutes, Sandy racked up seven personal best laps on the challenging 2.69-mile, 17-turn parkland circuit, finishing with a best of 1min 33.954secs. The Scot crossed the line in sixth, just 1.1s behind the #8 Mercedes, but knowing another of the cars ahead of him had an additional time penalty elevating the #78 to fifth.

“That was a good, strong performance from everyone in the team,” Sandy said. “I lacked a wee bit of pace in my stint because I was on used tyres, having decided to keep my fresh set for my opening stint in Race 2.”

However, Mother Nature was to scupper those plans. Having qualified second on the grid, and knowing the pole-sitting #18 Mercedes would have to serve an additional seven-second time penalty at its pitstop by dint of finishing second in the opener, the #78 pairing were in a strong position to take the win. But rain just before the start of the race meant Mitchell lost the benefit of his new slick Pirellis as the field had to start on wets. Nine minutes into the race and with the track drying rapidly, a dry racing line had emerged and the team opted to pit from second place to fit slicks.

“At the time it was the right call, because our sister Lamborghini had already switched to slicks and was lapping significantly faster,” he continued. “But Sod’s Law. A lap-and-a-half after I fitted slicks, the rain swept back in again. I persevered but we started losing too much time so we pitted again for wets. The second race was definitely not what we wanted,” stated Sandy, who was was in tenth position when he handed the car to Martin. “It was the right call to pit early for slicks, but after that the race just unravelled. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just one of those things. We rolled the dice and probably shouldn’t have, but sometimes the percentage game can catch you out. Frustratingly, once Alex was back on track he was faster than many of the cars ahead of him, but by that time we’d lost two laps with the additional pitstops. But there were a number of positives. I was really happy with my qualifying performance and I think generally the team did a very good job this weekend to put us in the position to score some big points.

“Plus I want to congratulate Hugo (Cook). We race together for Barwell in the Euro GT3 Sprint Cup, and today he took his first British GT win in the opening race driving the sister #1 Lamborghini. So big congrats to him.”

Sandy returns to action this weekend (May 30-June 1) when he heads to Monza for the latest three-hour race in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup.