British GT unveils new Donington Park raceday format

SRO, organisers of the Intelligent Money British GT Championship, has confirmed the series’ double-header raceday format at this weekend’s Donington Park round.

With the Spa-Francorchamps round dropping off the calendar, the championship has ensured the number of racing hours remains the same as 2019 and that has meant a first-of-its-kind schedule for the weekend with a two-hour endurance race following a one-hour sprint.

The sprint race on Sunday morning (16 August) follows the same format as the season-opening double-header at Oulton Park with a mandatory pitstop at half-distance not featuring refuelling.

On the afternoon the two-hour endurance-fest – which will award 1.5x points because of its longer format – will feature a mandatory fuel stop and is more familiar to regular watchers of Donington’s British GT races.

With the shake-up in racing, qualifying has been given an equally new look. The qualifying is still split into sessions for both Pro and Ams in GT3 & GT4, but things start to get a touch confusing from there. For the endurance race, the grid will be set using an aggregate of both driver’s times and for the sprint race, it’s the fastest laps set by drivers in the second session for both classes who will be setting the order for that encounter.

Taking on that slightly new format is a slightly new entry list – which you can see in full here – with notable additions from Oulton Park including the first appearance of Balfe Motorsport’s GT3 McLaren with Stewart Proctor and Joe Osborne taking in the first event of their part-time campaign.

Elsewhere, Michael Igoe has a new team-mate in his WPI Motorsport Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Evo as Andrea Caldarelli replaces Dennis Lind and there’s one Lamborghini less than last time as John Seale takes his JMH Automotive Huracán to GT Cup’s second round at Silverstone instead.

There’s also one less BMW M4 GT4 as the Team Tegiwa entry of Luke Sedzikowski and David Whitmore is skipping the trip to the East Midlands in its own part-season campaign.

Race one gets underway at 11.05 UK time (12.05 CET) and race two goes green at 16.30 UK (17.30 CET) with all the action set to be streamed on GT REPORT.