Basingstoke ObserverFOX Motorsport’s Nick Halstead and Jamie Stanley battled back from a disastrous start to the Silverstone 500 to claim a solid points finish at the British GT Championship’s showpiece event.
Nick and Jamie took their McLaren 720S GT3 to seventh place in the GT3 Pro-Am class on Sunday after a valiant effort from the team whose race looked doomed on the opening lap.
Having struggled to generate sufficient temperature in the McLaren’s front tyres during practice and qualifying, the pair started Sunday’s three-hour race - the longest of the British GT season - 10th in Pro-Am and 16th overall.
And their hopes of adding to the podium finish they recorded at the Oulton Park opener three weeks earlier looked slim when Nick was hit by a rival on the opening lap and stopped immediately; the impact having sent his car into limp mode.
Struggling to restart the engine, the driver from Andwell near Basingstoke was forced to perform a full electrical reset, after which he was able to resume, but a lap behind the leaders in 29th place overall.
Nick produced a magnificent opening stint; his laps the fastest of all for at least 20-30 minutes, thanks in no small part to major set-up changes by the Fox Motorsport team overnight, helping him to claw back some of the lost time.
While a zero-risk approach was taken to ensure a finish, continued strong race pace plus attrition elsewhere helped the duo to continue relentlessly climbing the order as the race progressed.
The McLaren’s seventh-place finish actually netted Nick and Jamie fourth-place points in Pro-Am as three of the cars that finished ahead of them were guest entrants and therefore not eligible to score.
They are provisionally fifth in the Pro-Am Drivers’ standings - just 10 points from the lead - while Fox are 10th in the overall GT3 Teams’ title race with two of seven rounds completed.
Nick Halstead said: “This is the definition of a mixed weekend. We were chasing the set-up all day on Saturday, but the team made some big changes to the front end overnight and the car was absolutely mega in the race. I was hit on the first lap by a GT4 car, stopped and lost so much time re-setting the car that we were out of it almost before we’d started. But we had the quickest car of anyone through most of my stint and I swear without the contact, I could have been up towards the top five or six overall by the time of the first pitstop. If we can get the car working like that from the get-go at Donington, we’ll be big contenders.”
Jamie Stanley said: “We could have had an amazing result today, but the reality is that after Nick was hit on the first lap and we had a couple of electrical issues, we finished and we banked solid points from a race that you could view as pretty nightmarish otherwise. Silverstone was rubbish for us last year with the GT4 car too, but we soldiered on, scored a handful of points and came back to take the title fight to the final lap of the season, so there’s every reason to be optimistic for the rest of the year given the pace we’ve shown today.”
Paul McNeilly, Team Principal, said: “It’s been an up-and-down weekend for Nick and Jamie, but the two big positives are that we clearly had a quick race car on Sunday and that Nick’s pace - especially in the opening stint - is proof that we have one of the fastest Am drivers in British GT right now. We’ll head to the next round at Donington very confident of putting in a strong performance on the track.”
