Highly successful Easter double-header for Barwell crews

This year the ELMS GTC (GT3) class is the most popular in the championship, with 14 high quality entries from the cream of Europe's GT teams, including AF Corse, SMP Racing, ART Grand Prix, Pro GT by Almeras , Prospeed and Team Sofrev-ASP – all of whom have been successful at the very highest levels of GT3 racing. Whilst we have plenty of experience in our driver line-up, including former ELMS GT Pro Champion, Jonny Cocker, and Spa 24 Hours GT2 podium finisher, Leo Machitski, we also have a very talented, but very inexperienced driver in Timur Sardarov. Timur stepped up to the challenge superbly, however, and didn't put a wheel wrong all weekend. 

Jonny put in a great effort to qualify the car fifth behind the top four Ferraris, with this car enjoying a seemingly quite beneficial Balance of Performance at the moment, and a significant straight line advantage. Cocker's effort was, however, one of the very best BMW Z4 laps ever seen at Silverstone, and good enough to defeat the remaining Ferraris plus all the McLarens, Porsches and the Audi. Leo then took the start of the four-hour race on Saturday, and put in a phenomenal double-stint during which he took on many of the top professional drivers in the other cars. He moved up as high as third place at one stage, and then brought the car back to the pits in fourth spot for Timur to take over for his first ever International race. Timur did a great job and improved his best ever lap times around Silverstone by three seconds over what he had done in practice, holding his own at the highest-level of European GT/sportscar racing. With the loss of only two places during his stint, and no mistakes or moments to speak of, Sardarov brought the stunning green and black Team Russia car in to hand over to Jonny for the final 70 minutes of the race. 

After another faultless fuel and tyre change service by the Barwell pit crew (the only car that spent less time in the pits was the race-winning Team Ukraine Ferrari), Jonny immediately took advantage of his new tyres to set lap times on a par with the leading Ferraris, and was on course to catch and pass the fifth placed car by the end of the race. Then, with just over 45 minutes remaining  a Safety Car came out and the Barwell engineers made an excellent call to bring Jonny in immediately for his ‘splash and dash' fuel stop. The two cars in front of us hesitated and followed the Safety Car round for another few laps, then coming in for their final stops, thus immediately moving us up into fourth place due to our superior pits strategy. Cocker thus reeled off the remaining laps to take a well-deserved fourth place finish.