Thomas Holland on securing pole: "It's what the team deserves"

Innovation Racing’s Thomas Holland praised his team for hitting the ground running as he and team-mate Hadley Simpson powered to pole for the opening round of the British GT Championship at Silverstone.

The team, experienced at racing at the sharp-end in GT Cup, are making their debut in SRO competition for the blue-riband Silverstone 500 and Holland was full of praise for the work team boss Simon Griffiths has put in to make sure the team’s Ginetta G56 GT4 Evo was ready for the weekend.

“It’s been a lot of work behind the scenes. I mean, I’ve got a massive amount of respect for Simon. I do feel sorry for him. I think he might start losing hair with how much stress this is causing him! But everyone’s putting a colossal amount of effort from where we started on Friday morning to now. I don’t think any of us would have expected we would have been anywhere near the front,” he explained.

Qualifying itself was a perfect demonstration of just how ready the team, and Holland, was for the chaos of the two-stage British GT qualifying format. Taking the first session, Holland gave Simpson the perfect platform to secure pole by setting a time 0.880sec faster than the rest of the competition.

He said: “I had no idea what on earth I was doing! I had a little nap before we went out. I was told: “Oh yeah, see if you can get into the 2m08s.” I saw everyone was hitting earlier in the day but couldn’t get anywhere near that time. But then I came back into the pits, saw a bunch of cameras and then Bryn [Lucas, British GT TV presenter] handed me a hat, which he hasn’t done in now three years of me knowing him! So I’m happy. I mean, I’m happy for the team. It’s what the team deserves. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster to get to this point, but everything’s coming together.”

Whilst the team is new, Holland is becoming something of an old-hand in British GT4 and is utilising that knowledge of racing Ginettas for CWS Racing and Raceway Motorsport to take a more holistic approach to what would be a positive result for the squad come the end of 180 minutes of what will no doubt be an intense start to the season.

“Anything can happen in the three-hour race. I’ve gone from being in a position to getting a podium to then being nowhere near anyone else. So there’s so much to play for in the three-hour race. So many chances for safety cars, full course yellows. Main thing is, is keeping our head down, not getting too complacent with what position we are in or what position we could be in. Because at the end of the day, when the checkered flag drops, we will do the best we can and we’ll end up where we are after our best effort,” he added.