British GT: Von Ryan Racing wins Silverstone 500
Von Ryan Racing’s pair Gilles Vannelet and Adrian Quaife-Hobbs won the fourth round of the British GT at Silverstone. This was first victory for McLaren 650S in the series.
They were just 0.588 seconds faster than Triple Eight Racing pair Joe Osborne and Lee Mowle, while the third place was won by Alexander Sims and reigning champion Marco Attard (Ecurie Ecosse Powered by Black Bull) which were 7.111 seconds behind the winners.
Jamie Chadwick and Ross Gunn scored their second victory in the row in the GT4 class. Beechdean AMR’s duo won in front of Mike Hart and Terry Langley (Quantamatic Racing). Third were Tom Oliphant and Rick Parfitt Jr. in the Team LNT‘s Ginetta.
Already first 15 minutes of the three-hours race at wet Silverstone track were action-packed. Pole-sitter Howard spinned on the turn in the first lap and Vannelet took the lead in front of Attard and Ahmad Al Harthy, while in GT4 class Oz Yusuf maintained his lead. In the same class, Beechdean AMR also had a problem after Chadwick failed out top three after spinning.
It was so lot overtaking, spinning and clashing it was very hard to catch all the happenings. After some half of hour, safety car went out after big hit in which were involved TF Sport #17 Aston Martin and FF Corse #18 Ferrari. Most of the teams has decided to go to the pit-stop in that moment for the first change of the drivers and the race was resumed in the better conditions as rain has stopped.
Von Ryan Racing was at the top and used a traffic jam behind them to set fastest lap after fastest lap, but there were also Triple Eight Racings’ car #888, RAM Racing‘s Mercedes with Lewis Plato and also Jon Barnes of 22GT Racing which looked very good in the second hour of the race.
It looked like it will be unusually quiet final third of the race. but everything has changed in the last 35 minutes. Mark Farmer bounced over the kerbs, lost the back end, and hit the wall hard. He was taken to the medical center for a check over with only 20 minutes of race left to run.
The final sprint to finish line saw Adrian Quaife-Hobbs moving upfront to make sure that a hard charging Joe Osborne didn’t pip him, while the defending champion No.1 car was too far to battle for the victory.
