British GT Silverstone: Patterson/Shahin win on strategy, Innovation takes GT4 glory on debut

Yasser Shahin and Garnet Patterson took a captivating Silverstone 500 victory as their Optimum Motorsport team played strategy to perfection as they managed a chaotic British GT Championship season-opener, and issues with their McLaren, to take a victory on the pair’s series debut.

In GT4, Innovation Racing prevailed in a race-long fight with MK Racing to ensure Thomas Holland and Hadley Simpson converted the team’s debut pole to a debut victory in their Ginetta G56 GT4 Evo – reward for working until 2am the night before the race.

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Shahin and Patterson’s run to a remarkable debut victory in the Silverstone 500 was a testament to the ability to avoid drama, and have a pit strategy that reacted quickly to make the most of the chaos that was unfolding all round them. Such was their clean and reactive approach, they basically didn’t feature at all in the action until the end of the race.

The race itself proved action-packed. There was drama right from the start, as the 2 Seas Motorsport pair of Charles Dawson and Kevin Tse collided at Copse. Dawson in the #1 appeared to try and shut the door on Tse, but the #18 collided with him and sent the former spinning into the gravel. He got going again, but eventually had a lengthy stop to repair with brake issues. Tse tried to limp round, but with front-left wheel damage, he ended up in the gravel at Vale – to add insult to injury, he was slapped with a 10-place grid penalty for the Oulton Park round.

When the race went green again after a five minute delay, the action proved to be intriguing, rather than outright chaotic. Leung made a clean getaway and had opened up 1.3sec in his BMW M4 GT3 Evo, but Rob Collard was getting his Barwell Huracán up to speed quickly and quickly closed the gap to within 0.5sec.

Before the battle could get too exciting, we had a Full Course Yellow to recover the Townsend Racing Aston Martin GT4 from the Abbey gravel trap.

From there, strategies started to subtly diverge, with everyone bar Simon Orange and Andrew Howard pitting on the lap the FCY was called. They pitted a lap later, but the early stops meant things were shaping up to be a strategic battle throughout the remaining 2h30min.

As the race went green again, with 2h15min to go, the biggest mover proved to be Ben Barnicoat, who took over the #77 Optimum McLaren from Morgan Tillbrook. Squeezing up the inside of Marcus Clutton on the run into Brooklands, he set a 1m58.299sec – a qualifying effort – to quickly close in on Ross Gunn in the Beechdean Aston.

On the rear of the Vantage, he lunged up the inside of Gunn at The Loop and then disappeared up the road as he set about catching the cars ahead as the first hour ticked to its conclusion.

What proceeded that was probably one of British GT’s all-time greatest stints, as Barnicoat played a smart game to get past Collard’s co-driver Hugo Cook. Blocked at The Loop and Brooklands, Barnicoat’s pressure saw Cook run slightly wide at Luffield, more than enough gap for the orange McLaren to force a way through to second.

Freed to chase down erstwhile leader Dan Harper, taking over from Leung at the first round of stops, Barnicoat was a man possessed and cut down the lead from over seven seconds to just over five in a handful of laps. Before pitting with 1h40min to go, he set the new race lap record, a 1min57.730sec knocking almost four-tenths off the previous margin set by Tillbrook’s former driving partner Marvin Kirchhöfer last year.

But then, drama. Toward the halfway mark an optimistic lunge from Darren Turner in the Grange Racing with FSR Aston Martin tried to get him in the middle of the Revie Lake’s Mahiki McLaren and Jack Collins’ Century BMW going through Brooklands. He was arguably too far back to make the move, and clipped Lake’s McLaren, breaking them both beyond repair and taking them out of contention for at least a class podium.

The resulting FCY/Safety Car proved to be a big problem for Optimum as Harper and Leung were gifted a free stop which put them back at the front with Collard and Cook promoted back into second.

As the old saying goes, cautions breed cautions. And when the race went green with 74 minutes remaining, there were two incidents in half-a-lap. First, the #24 Century BMW, which Branden Templeton took over from Jack Collins, clipped the Rodin Ferrari at Stowe, sending it spinning with collapsed rear-left suspension. Then, heading into Village, Collard pulled over his Lamborghini with smoke and fire pouring from the engine.

That, obviously, led to yet another neutralisation as both cars were recovered. The upside for the competition was Howard moving the Beechdean Aston back up to second, with Alex Martin third in yet another Barwell Lamborghini, this one shared with Jarrod Waberski.

As the race went green once again, with just under an hour left, it seemed as though Optimum had played a masterstroke. With 100 minutes max drive time for a single driver over the course of the race, the team installed Barnicoat in Tillbrook’s place as soon as the former had enough time to complete the race.

But it all went wrong. Timing screens flashed with an investigation into the car’s stop and the penalty was swift – a one-second stop/go penalty for not meeting the minimum pit-stop time which dropped the car back down to 12th.

Whilst one Optimum car was having dramas, another of the team’s entries was stealthing to the front. Yasser Shahin and Garnett Patterson pitted twice within the first 70 minutes and made their final stop during the interruption for the Ferrari and Lamborghini. Those stops cycled them for the front, and with a quick stop under the final Full Course Yellow after Duncan Cameron put his Lamborghini into the Abbey gravel trap to ensure they met the maximum driver time, it seemed to be go swimmingly for the McLaren crew.

Mastering the restart, Patterson took off down the road and took an untroubled victory to cap a quite remarkable race where an alternative strategy, not putting a foot wrong, and hitting their marks proved to be the difference.

After the race, Patterson told GT REPORT: “It might have looked perfect on paper but it definitely wasn’t! We were battling a car issue from about 30 minutes in which took away quite a lot of performance. Yasser did a great job to drive around it and I did the same. Everyone in the team did a great job with all the tools we have available to fix that. So to win on our debut with probably not the fastest car on the grid is very cool. Big kudos to the Optimum team, the strategy is what won us the race today.

“We had some pretty experienced people round us today who know when to roll the dice and what works. We were pretty sure that starting from ninth we wanted to do something alternate and if you follow the train you end up in the same position. When you don’t have the quickest car you have to try something and adapt and that’s what we did.”

Second went to Charles Clark and Jonathan Beeson, another crew you can stick in the ‘perfect strategy’ box. They were always able to pit roughly around the neutralisations and that proved the decisive factor as they got ahead of Leung and Harper around the hour to go mark and moved to the front. With Patterson and Shahin not taking points as a guest entry, they’re leading the championship in their Century Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 Evo.

Harper and Leung took third, not really putting a foot wrong but not quite being in the right place at the right time as the dramas unfolded around them.

Marcus Clutton and Simon Orange took fourth overall, and second in Pro-Am as well as second in the championship standings when you remove the one-off duos, after a race with some real highlights for the Orange Racing with JMH McLaren crew. One such highlight came late on as, after the final restart, Clutton got onto the back of Waberski’s Lamborghini and took no time in lunging up his inside heading into Village to take away the position.

Martin and Waberski finished in fifth, ahead of Ross Gunn and Andrew Howard after what appeared to be a late technical gremlin whilst Howard was behind the wheel of the Vantage that temporarily robbed them of some time.

After his early heroics, getting caught attempting an alternate strategy relegated Barnicoat and Tillbrook to seventh, but they should take the confidence into the rest of the season that they are genuinely one of the quickest duos in the field.

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On paper, a lights-to-flag victory for Innovation Racing would smack of a quiet race but nothing could be further from the truth as Hadley Simpson and Thomas Holland converted the team’s debut pole to a debut win.

From the green flag, the battle at the sharp-end of of GT4 was captivating to watch. At the start, Will Orton in the MK Racing Aston Martin powered ahead of Thomas Holland in the pole-sitting Innovation Racing Ginetta.

Despite Orton’s rapid start, Holland was always about a car length off the back of the British Racing Green coloured machine and with 15 minutes gone, Holland made a great move. Pulling level heading onto the Wellington Straight, Holland held his nerves on the brakes going into Brooklands and pulled clear – a position he held until the Townsend car’s FCY with 30 minutes gone.

When they went back to green, the biggest mover was Jack Mitchell in the Toro Verde Ginetta. First passing Jessica Hawkins, who took over from Orton, he then powered round the outside of Holland’s co-driver Hadley Simpson at Aintree to muscle his way into the lead of the class.

The biggest change at the middle distance proved to be the collision between Turner and Lake, the pair were running strongly toward the top half of the GT4 before the Aston clipped the McLaren’s rear-left and sent them both into retirement.

With that chaos, Mitchell and Luke Shaw lost a chunk of time as their competition were gifted a ‘free’ stop because of the low speeds everyone had to trundle around at. That promoted Holland up to the lead once again, with the Orton/Hawkins Aston in second and Optimum’s Luca Hopkinson and Josh Stanton in third.

That order remained through the next FCY to clean up the Ferrari and Lamborghini, but an early change from Shaw to Mitchell with roughly 55mins remaining threw a strategy cat amongst the pigeons as other teams had to make sure they didn’t exceed the 100-minute maximum driver time over the course of the race.

But the damage for them was done, having lost a handful of places earlier they struggled to make up the difference. Ahead, Innovation was sitting pretty, fending off the pressure from Orton and then Hawkins as they both pitted to change drivers with just under 30 minutes left to go.

Despite turning the screw, Hawkins couldn’t make a move for the lead – aided in part by the pair having to dodge GT3 traffic carving through the field – and Innovation took a quite remarkable victory on debut.

After the race, Simpson told GT REPORT: “I feel like we deserved that one, we worked so hard and the pitstops were excellent. We played the game and felt very in control. The safety car at the end was a bit nerve-wracking to say the least but I’m happy that we could end up on top. The Aston always seemed to be looming, and we were on the same strategy so they were in the pits at the same time as us too but really positive, it was a close fight but to win on debut is just incredible. It doesn’t feel real, we were at the track until 2am last night fixing everything even though we were on pole, it just shows how hard the team work and this is the result of it.”

They might not feel that way having come so close to winning, but Orton and Hawkins should take confidence that they have a strong car underneath them as they took second overall and in the Silver Cup.

Third in that sub-competition was Luca Hopkinson and Josh Stanton in the Optimum Motorsport McLaren Artura, who always seemed to occupy that position throughout the 180 minutes as they stuck to a clear strategy throughout.

Winning Pro-Am, and fifth overall just behind the #24 Century Motorsport BMW involved in a lot of the race action, was Mitchell and Shaw, the pair able to at least walk away with a gold trophy for their Toro Verde GT squad. Rounding out the podium was Ronan Pearson and John Hartshorne for GBR Stratton Motorsport, and the WSR Flexifly BMW M4 GT4 Evo of Ernie Graham and Colin Turkington.

The next round of the British GT Championship sees the field head to Oulton Park for a very different weekend of racing, as the three-hour format is replaced by two one-hour sprint affairs on May 23 & 25.