The majority of cars on parade at Donington Park were from the GT4 class, with a stacked class developing, 20+ cars for the season across (currently) eight different marques, with some exciting new additions to the Championship and one possibly surprising marque missing from the 2019 list!
The season entry sees the Aston Martin Vantage GT4 as the most numerous car on the grid, the seven cars entered part of what DSC understands to be some 45 cars either already built and/ or sold.
Again with TF Sport and Optimum testing at Oulton Park the Media Day total was just two of the new GT4 Astons with Beechdean AMR’s newly delivered car for Kelvin Fletcher and Martin Plowman and the first of Academy Motorsport’s pair also present.
Of the media day gathering, the McLaren 570S GT4 was the most numerous with both of Tolman Motorsports’ pair present, their McLaren Driver Development Programme driver pairings apparently confirmed as James Dorlin and Josh Smith in the #4 car, the #5 in the hands of Jordan Collard and Lewis Proctor.
HHC Motorsport had just one of their new 570S GT4s available, the McLaren in a throwback livery to the teams original Ginetta Junior colour scheme, their second car due for delivery next week, Charlie Kemp telling DSC that the deal had come together very late, discussions with McLaren only starting in November.
The HHC switch means that there will be no Ginetta GT4 on the grid for the British Championship since the very first year of the class back in 2008 – the G50 and G55 a mainstay of the class in the UK for a decade – at least four G50s and/ or G55s entered every year since then. HHC will continue though, to campaign Ginettas, including a GT4 car, in other competition.
The final GT4 McLaren is the #20, operated in familiar colours (pictured top) for Graham Johnson and Michael O’ Brien by Balfe Motorsport, the team one of six on the season entry to be operating cars in both major classes (together with TF Sport, Optimum, Beechdean AMR, Team Parker Racing and Century).
New to the British Championship in 2019 is the Multimatic-built Ford Mustang GT4 – three cars will contest the season and two of them ran at Donington – one the Multimatic run # 15 car that will see Canadian Scott Maxwell, a veteran of several generations of Multimatic-built Mustangs, paired with Seb Priaulx.
The other car on track, is the first UK customer car, the #23 car for RACE Performance pairing Sam Smelt and Aron Taylor-Smith.
The second #19 Multimatic car listed for Billy Johnson and TBC is set to see a rotation of Gold/ Bronze pairings through the season as Multimatic work to sell cars into the UK and across Europe.
Returning GT4 Champions Century Motorsport were on track with one of their pair of BMW M4 GT4s, the #43 for Angus Fender and Andrew Gordon-Colebrooke, Nathan Freke closing in on a late deal to field the team’s second #42 car.
Both Fox Motorsport and Team Parker Racing ran with their Mercedes AMG GT4s whilst the debuting Track Focused KTM, GT Marques Porsche 718 Cayman Clubsport, and the solo Invictus Games Racing Jaguar F Type SVR GT4 completed the Donington line-up.
