Silverstone Weekend Notebook

Photo: British GT

***The British GT Championship’s blue riband race at Silverstone, the Silverstone 500, will have 29 cars on the grid including several new entries. The final entry list is available here.

***A pre-event test was held at Silverstone on Friday afternoon. Team Parker Racing finished 1-2, with Callum Macleod going 0.067 seconds faster than Seb Morris. Ciaran Haggerty was fastest in GT4 for Black Bull Garage 59.

***Stratton Motorsport and GPRM have both made their series return with a Lotus Evora and Toyota GT86, respectively. Both cars are running in the Invitational class, although GPRM’s Toyota is close to GT4-spec.

***Academy Motorsport wasn’t present at Silverstone yesterday as Will Moore and Matt Nicoll-Jones competed in the GT4 European Series Northern Cup round at the Red Bull Ring in Austria. They returned to the UK overnight in time to start the race from the back of the field.

***Both Team ABBA with Rollcentre Racing and UltraTek Racing RJN are running three-driver lineups this weekend as they are joined by Adam Christodoulou (Team ABBA Mercedes-AMG GT3) and Struan Moore (No. 54 RJN Nissan 370Z GT4).

***Drive-time regulations for the three-hour race are slightly different, with a minimum of three pit stops and driver changes required for two-driver entries. No driver may exceed 100 minutes behind the wheel, but all must complete at least two stints. 

***Drivers in three-driver crews must complete a minimum of 40 minutes but no longer than 100 minutes. The Pro driver must do the second stint with the second Am doing the third stint. Any driver can do the final stint.

***As usual, the Am driver contesting the first half of Qualifying must start the race, while the slowest driver in Qualifying in Silver pairings must take the start.

***Today’s race is expected to be Martin Short’s last in British GT competition, and he says the decision to move the Team ABBA with Rollcentre Racing car to Pro-Am was because it had been the only all-Am car in the field. “I’ve stepped out of cars before when I was in LMP1 with the Pescarolo, and I know when you’ve got to get out of the car,” he told Sportscar365.

“In British GT, the way it is with the Pro drivers, you can’t not have a Pro driver. If there had been three Am-Am pairings, we could have raced against them but nobody wants to pick up a trophy that they haven’t earned.”

***Aleksander Schjerpen has returned to Century Motorsport alongside Charlie Robertson in the team’s sole Ginetta G55 GT3, although the Norwegian driver is believed to be contracted only for this race, and so the future of Century’s GT3 cars remains uncertain.

***The series organized a “circuit safari” yesterday afternoon, believed to be the first outside of Japan where they are commonplace in the Super GT series. Media and guests were invited onboard a 1965 London bus which went on track at the end of Free Practice 2 with the GT3 and GT4 cars.

***The race will get underway at 1:35 p.m. local time and will be streamed live on the series’ Facebook page.

Jake Kilshaw

Jake Kilshaw is a UK-based journalist. He is a graduate of Politics and International Relations.