A gamble to pit twice under the first of three Full Course Yellows paid off spectacularly for Paradine Competition’s Darren Leung and Dan Harper as the former champions returned to British GT in some style, storming to Silverstone 500 success.

Harper held off a late charge from 2 Seas Motorsport’s Kiern Jewiss, the latter banking maximum points alongside fellow Donington winner Charles Dawson as the Mercedes pair extended their championship lead.

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It was a double for Century Motorsport – which engineers the Paradine entry – as Charlie Robertson and Ravi Ramyead benefited from a heart-in-mouth suspension failure for long-time leaders Mahiki Racing to take a crushing victory in GT4

GT3

With 180 minutes of racing staring at the teams, it was no wonder that the start was relatively calm with Tillbrook getting a clean getaway in his Optimum 720S despite Kevin Tse keeping him honest in the 2 Seas Motorsport Mercedes-AMG GT3.

The biggest mover was Alex Martin, who powered up to third at Maggotts round the outside of Giacomo Petrobelli’s Blackthorn AMR Aston Martin Vantage and was looking relatively racy in the Barwell Huracán. 

But the Lamborghini wasn’t third for long. Petrobelli wasn’t taking his demotion lying down and was up under Martin’s rear wing for the first 20 minutes of the race, and it was a great lunge up the inside going into the Club chicane that allowed the Italian to power his way back up to third.

Uncorked from behind Martin, he set about chasing down the leading pair of Tillbrook and Tse – the former holding solid at the front despite his tyres, used in qualifying, starting to fade. 

Within the first 30 minutes, the trio were split by just 1.1 seconds and it was their confidence and guile to choose the ideal points to scythe through GT4 traffic that was causing the margin to contract and expand depending on exactly where the traffic was being encountered.

The biggest shuffle proved to be the first round of pitstops. With no pit windows, just a need to serve a minimum of three driver changes, it was up to the team to figure out their own strategies. 2 Seas blinked first, with 2 hours and 23 minutes still to go, Tse boxed to handover to Maxi Götz.

It looked like a great move, but the racing gods were feeling malicious. Mike Price’s Optimum Motorsport McLaren 720S GT3 ground to a halt through Village and necessitated the use of the first of numerous Full Course Yellows to push the car to safety behind the barriers.

That played into the hands of Blackthorn. Pitting a lap later to handover to Jonny Adam, the Scot could speed out of the pits before having to slow to 60kph and was at pit exit before Götz was even level with pit entry. 

But benefitting also was Tillbrook and the second Barwell Lamborghini of Rob Collard – who caught up to Tillbrook cutting through traffic. The pair pitted another lap later again and with Silverstone being such a long lap, the duo swapped to Marvin Kirchhöfer and Hugo Cook respectively, and came out in the lead. 

With the FCY, and resulting safety car period mandated under British GT rules, being more than 20 minutes long, the BMW M4 GT3 Evo of Leung and Harper pitted twice with the latter telling the stream that “it was worth the gamble to go onto an alternative strategy.”

While it dropped them down the order somewhat, the pair were in the prime position for the remaining two hours of the race having ticked off two-thirds of their mandatory stops already. 

Going the other way was Tse and Götz, who also tried a pair of quick stops and lost time – with salt rubbed in the wound as Marcus Clutton muscled his way up the inside of the blue AMG on the restart at Copse and caused the car to drop down a few more places. 

On that restart, Kirchhöfer set about making a decent lead for himself and grew a 1.8sec advantage over Cook. But the track didn’t stay green for long as Sam Neary, battling with Matt Griffin for fifth, went a touch over the line in his Team Abba Racing Mercedes-AMG. He touched the back of Griffin’s Spirit of Race Ferrari going into Club and sent the latter spinning into the gravel, meaning another neutralisation to drag the green 296 out of the gravel pit. 

Diverging strategies are one of the joys of the 500 and this second FCY was possibly the most significant decision point for teams up and down the field. Stick or twist? Stay out or leap in? Cook, Kirchhöfer, Jewiss, Clutton and Steller Motorsport’s Darren Burke all chose the latter. Neary, Beechdean’s Tom Wood and Blackthorn’s second Aston of Charles Bateman stayed out and were up in the top three positions with Leung right behind them – sitting pretty. 

Going green with 100 minutes left, there was immediately a flurry of penalties that shook up the front of the field and removed the chance of a win for a few crews. One after the other, both Barwell Huracáns got a penalty – the #1 of Collard & Cook for overtaking under yellows and the #78 of Martin & Patrick Kujala for a short stop.

Add in a 10sec stop/go for Neary’s contact with Griffin and the lead shifted to Wood, with second going to the stealthily rising Francesco Castellacci. The Italian in the second Spirit of Race Ferrari was pulling off moves to get himself up the field, taking Leung and Bateman in short order to find himself in second.

But then, there was yet another FCY – the final interruption of the race – as Aiden Neate’s rear-left suspension in his GT4 leading Mahiki Racing Lotus Emira decided it had enough of being properly attached to the car and spectacularly failed. Thankfully, a gravel trap on the outside of Farm Curve stopped Neate before he could contact the barriers, but it meant another interruption for the Lotus to be recovered.

Being so close to the end – the yellow came out with 80 minutes left – brought up a number of issues. Regulations dictate that a max stint was 65 minutes, would teams go early? Or try and stretch out the FCY and safety car for long enough that they could slip under the magic 65 minutes?

With just 65 minutes left, a number of cars blinked – stints begin at pit exit so they had a little margin – with the #77 Optimum car of Tillbrook, Simon Orange’s McLaren he shares with Clutton and the Petrobelli/Adam Aston Martin all coming in. 

They came in just as race control announced the safety car was coming in, and just a lap later, Leung and Matt Topham followed it in to make their final stops – the latter taking over the Audi from Burke. 

That once again shook up the order as Jewiss who, alongside Dawson, had played the strategy game pretty well to move their way up the order as the race unfolded, to be in the prime position. Against Ams Richard Neary and Andrew Howard, Jewiss firstly snatched second from Neary – having made up places again following son Sam’s penalty – and then braked as late as he dared to take the lead off Howard as the Beechdean man ran towards Copse corner. 

It looked as though the pendulum was swinging towards Jewiss and Dawson after Paradine was penalised for being one-second short on one of Leung’s handovers to Harper, but there was yet more drama to come. 

At the same time as 2 Seas called the Mercedes in for its final stop, an ominous message came from race control that the car was under investigation. 10 minutes past before it was slapped with a drive-through penalty for overtaking the Jolt Mclaren Artura under yellows just as the final FCY was called. 

Jewiss had built a 12-second advantage to Harper, but it wasn’t enough. Just as Jewiss took the pit limiter off at pit exit, Harper swept ahead but by just three seconds. Game on. 

For a time, it was slow and steady does it as Jewiss looked to maintain life in his Mercedes’ Pirelli tyres. He wasn’t relaxing though, as the deficit went from 2.9sec to just about one second as the pair duelled through traffic. Jewiss had a chance with just over five minutes to go as Harper got muscled wide at Luffield by a GT4 Porsche but kept his composure and maintained the lead.

The hotspot proved to be the last lap. Closing in on every corner, Jewiss lunged first at Village and then tried to brake late at The Loop – hoping to distract 2023 British GT champion Harper just enough to find a gap through. 

It wasn’t to be. Harper isn’t one for distractions and, aided slightly by needing to lap Jack Brown in the Optimum Artura on the way through the left-hander of Brooklands, he took the chequered flag with half-a-second in hand. A second Silverstone 500 win for he and Leung but maximum points for Jewiss and Dawson – the former pair don’t score because of their one-off entry. 

Third went to Kirchhöfer and Tillbrook. The pair didn’t put a foot wrong, but with strategy descending into essentially a gamble the Optimum team perhaps just missed that extra 1% that would have gotten them closer into the lead. Still, a race lap record for Kirchhöfer demonstrated the pair were giving it everything they had. 

Petrobelli and Adam took fourth, another crew to add to the column of their tactics on the day not quite paying off but they’ll be grateful for the points after a drama filled season-opener at Donington last time out. 

Orange Racing with JMH took fifth on track, but Orange and Clutton finished the race under a slight cloud, however, as the incident between Clutton and the 2 Seas car on the first restart was investigated after the race and Clutton was slapped with a 10sec penalty. That meant they dropped to sixth behind Hugo Cook and Rob Collard. The former was unlucky not to take fifth on the road, his late charge in the #1 Barwell Lamborghini just fell short. 

Notable down the order, the Team Abba crew took 10th, having had to pit within the incident-free final hour, while Tse and Götz were victims of the strategy coin landing on tails rather than heads – dropping down to a lapped 13th by the end of the race.

GT4

Speaking of coins landing the wrong way, the GT4 race was a demonstration of the good and the bad of Mahiki Racing’s trio of Lotus Emiras. It seems there’s still truth to the old joke that Lotus stands for ‘Lots of trouble, usually serious…’

At the start, it was clear running for Josh Miller, who took the same approach that scored him and Aiden Neate a comfortable pole in the #84 and just put his foot down and departed. A clean first lap was the foundation for a great opening stint that built him up a lead of more than 11 seconds by the time the first FCY was called for, aided no end by a squabble between Harry George’s Optimum Artura and Ravi Ramyead in the Century Motorsport BMW M4 GT4 Evo.

Through the first round of stops, the #84 was sitting pretty but there was the first signs of trouble in the sister #69, which was driven to such good effect during yesterday’s practice sessions by Jack Mitchell. That car, while running mid-order with Steven Lake, was struck down with a front-right ball joint which sheared by itself – relegating the car into retirement.

Having to serve an extra 12 seconds during every stop as a Silver Cup entry meant Neate declined to pit during the second neutralisation, setting up what could have been an intriguing strategy of pitting twice within the second-half of the race.

That would never come to pass. As explained in the GT3 section, the rear-left spectacularly failed and Neate went spinning into the gravel, throwing another spanner into the works for a team that has lost results due to mistakes and misfortune so far this year. 

That meant Charlie Robertson, who had benefitted from being in a Pro-Am partnership with Ramyead and was slowly been closing in on Neate, found himself in second and behind the #12 of Ed McDermott and Seb Morris. That car, though, owed a stop and once the necessary pit work was completed, Robertson was sitting happy in his BMW.

Lap after lap, the Scot extended his lead and rarely looked as though the win was in doubt. He crossed the line a lap ahead of Jack Brown and Marc Warren, the latter pair not making any errors but not quite having the same pace in their Artura. The two crews took one-two overall and in Pro-Am.

Third went the way of the Silver Cup winners, as Chris Salkeld and Brandon Templeton had an equally trouble-free race to round out a remarkable day for Century, with the squad taking GT3 honours under the Paradine banner as well as GT4 overall, Pro-Am and Silver Cup. 

Fourth – second in Silver – went to George and Luca Hopkinson in the second Optimum Artura, while fifth was the winners of the Endurance Cup: Will Burns and Jamie Orton in their Rob Boston Racing Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Club Sport. The Endurance Cup will skip the next round at Oulton Park (on May 23 – 25) and will return for June’s trip to Spa-Francorchamps. 

That next round at Oulton sees British GT go from one extreme to the other, with the three-hour replaced by a pair of one-hour encounters on bank holiday Monday – the Saturday/Monday format being retained despite the shift away from Easter weekend.