PIRELLI MARANELLO FERRARI CHALLENGE
RACE REPORT : ROUND 5 : DONINGTON : 4 JUNE 2000

Repeat Performance

The second successive race at Donington featured an excellent 28-car entry. The AMOC-organised meeting was an attractive affair, with numerous other sportscar races that enabled some of the Ferrari boys to enter more than one event and several of them took part in the Intermarque and the Ferrari vs. Porsche events.

Qualifying was unfortunately only a short session because of two red flag incidents. Marc Gachoud took his 355/Ch almost immediately into the gravel at Coppice, from where the marshals had to extricate it. More seriously, however, was the next red flag which followed Rory Fordyce's coming together with the barriers at the bottom of the Craner Curves.

All this left little time for qualifying but the grid had Ian Hetherington's F50 on pole, with John Seale's 355/Ch, over 1.6 secs. behind, sharing the front row. Andy Christopher's 308GTB was third, ahead of Alan Cosby (F512M), Graham Reeder (355/Ch) and Nicky Paul-Barron (355/Ch). In the "O" class, David Ashburn set a stunning qualifying time in his F355GTS but was closely followed by the similar tipos of Gary Culver and Shaun Powell.

John Seale took full advantage of his front grid position and led away at the start, pursued by Hetherington, Christopher, P-B and Reeder. David Ashburn had already eliminated himself from the "O" class battle with an off at Old Hairpin.

By lap 2 Hetherington had the powerful F50 in the lead, chased by the three Challenge cars, in the order Seale-NPB-Reeder, and Christopher's 308, but rapidly closing on this group was Cosby's F512M, which had had a tardy start. Systematically the Kent Brushes car leap-frogged its way into second place and even began to close on the leading F50 by the time the chequered flag came out.

The scrap behind was resolved in the order Christopher-Seale-Reader and NP-B, with Marc Gachoud (355/Ch) and Phil Nuttall (355/Ch) taking seventh and eighth places respectively.

Following David Ashburn's demise on lap 1, the "O" class went to Culver's 355, with Powell's and Ingram-Hill's similar tipos taking second and third places.

But this was not the final order because the call came for Graham Reeder to see the Clerk of the Course about a yellow flag incident. After a while it was announced that he was being given a 5-sec penalty and this was enough to promote NP-B into fifth overall, with Reeder dropping down to sixth.

The points situation in the various classes is beginning to crystallise, with Hetherington pulling out a healthy lead over Cosby in the "S" class and Culver taking a handy lead in the "O" class, ahead of Ashburn. In the Challenge class Graham Reeder leads by a smaller margin over the consistently scoring John Avery.

The next round takes place at Silverstone on Saturday 24th June.

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