Charles Dawson, one-half of the first British GT Championship pole-sitting driver crew of 2025 has expressed his surprise at his lap in the Am section of qualifying, which secured his and Kiern Jewiss’ front-row start at Donington Park. 

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Making his GT3 bow in the 2 Seas Motorsport Mercedes-AMG GT3, Dawson admitted to GT REPORT that he wasn’t expecting to have such an advantage to hand over to Jewiss, after the relative speed of his competitors in testing.

He put in two laps good enough for the top spot in the opening 10-minute qualifying session, with his final lap giving him a massive 0.697sec advantage over fellow 2 Seas racer Kevin Tse – defying his rookie tag, and seeming like a GT3 natural already.

Dawson added: “I wouldn’t quite say natural but it was a good lap – two laps – to be honest with you. I wasn’t expecting that delta to the other guys, they’ve been super-quick the last few days and we weren’t sand-bagging in Pre-Qualifying just tidied up the last sector a little bit and walked away with a really good lap.”

His lap, a 1m25.234sec, came on the seventh of seven laps he managed to squeeze in during the rapid session on a warm but windy Donington afternoon but, Dawson explained, he knew the tyre would have enough life to still provide green sector times deep into the stint.

“I think when you look at the top guys, they’re doing 24s so I guess with the times I’m doing there’s still some tyres left. Donington isn’t super-high deg and on our new tyre run this morning [in Free Practice] we were doing it on lap four as well. If I wanted to fully use the peak then maybe lap two, three or four but it just shows the tyre is still there,” Dawson said.

Pole comes in his first GT3 qualifying session after moving up from a stint in GT4 that garnered wins in British GT4, GT4 Winter Series and GT4 European Series. His move into the more powerful category hasn’t come up without its challenges, but having Donington Park as the season opener, a circuit Dawson has good experiences of in the past.

He said: “I did a couple of days testing in the pre-season just getting in the car and getting some mileage and I had a couple of accidents and wasn’t at my best really and yeah so been trying to find the limits. I like Donington as a circuit and went well here last year so I had good confidence I could do a job here and very happy.”