This weekend’s round of the British GT Championship at Silverstone saw the first appearance of the much anticipated Toyota G86 in GT4 trim. Despite posting times that would have placed the car half way up the provisional GT4 grid, Saturday’s second free practice session brought disappointment however as the car became an early withdrawal after a promising but all too brief display.
The GPRM entered car was being driven by Stefan Hodgetts when the engine let go, dropping enough oil at the entry to the fast Becketts complex to bring out the red flags. DSC found GPRM partners Roger King and Gary Blackham in the garage, who were good enough to involve us in their post session analysis.
“There was a failure of the oil system, which is frustrating because we could almost have predicted it,” began King. “Things had gone perfectly in our testing sessions, but here in proper racing conditions we’ve experienced G-Forces that have forced the oil out of the sump. This was particularly evident in the Brooklands/Luffield complex. The really annoying thing is that we have the solution on the bench back at the factory, where we have another engine built with a different sump configuration that would have overcome this.”
“We found the limit today, which we didn’t in testing,” said Blackham. “The solution is sitting in the workshop just down the road, ready to go; it’s even got a re-designed exhaust manifold that works with the sump position, so it’s something we were well clued up on, but we just chose not to bring it with us because the car had been going well without it. We are balancing our programme with our Touring Car involvement so we won’t beat ourselves up. This is obviously really disappointing so early in the weekend but actually we’re quite happy with our progress.”
Roger King concurred: “We’ve gathered lots of data from our sessions this morning. We’ve got really good fuel consumption figures so in that, at least, we’ve learned a lot. We are funding this programme ourselves and are committed to the series, which is giving some great racing in its Pro-Am format. We will sort this and we will be around.”
ML
