14-03-17 Winter League Final Round

Louis Parker wins a thrilling A Final beating Gavin Maciver by 0.55 seconds with Mark Deacon taking third place and Steve Donald fourth.
Jordan Galbraith dominated the club mardave class being 2 laps better than everyone in qualifying and winning the final.

Track
A new James Hart design this week was excellent

Qualifying
GT12
In round 1 of the qualifying F2 driver Steve Donald put in a great drive to be fastest followed by F1 drivers Gavin Maciver and Mark Deacon. Daniel Lacey was in second position in F2 followed by Javier Jimenez.
Paul Carter was the leading driver in F3 a lap ahead of David Snowden.
Mark Deacon put in a stunning drive in round 2 to take the lead just ahead of louis Parker with Steve Donald unable to improve on his first round result and dropping down into third place. We were looking forward to a final round shoot out this week for League third place trophy between Ashley King and Mark but with Ashley not racing it was not to be – was the pressure too much?
In the last round of Louis Parker hit the front finding an extra two laps to take pole in the finals, Mark was second and Gavin third. Steve Donald was fourth and best in F2 with Daniel Lacey second and Matt Popejoy moving up into third place.
Paul Carter headed F3, David Snowden was second and John Stringer third.

V12 Mardave
Mike Simpson won round 1 with Alex Forster in second place and Roy Matthews third, in round 2 “Team Galbraith” sprang into action with Joshua, Jordan and Paul taking second, third and fourth places – was the evening to be a Galbraith 1-2-3 finish in the final?  Roy moved ahead of Alex in F2 with Wes Wray third.
In the last qualifying round Jordan moved up a gear to have a runaway victory by two laps to take pole with Mike second and Joshua third.

Finals
Jordan Galbraith started from pole on the mardave final grid and had a great drive to set the fastest lap and win by a clear lap. Behind him things were much closer between Mike Simpson, Joshua and Paul Galbraith. In the end Mike finished second just managing to hold off Joshua who finished third. Roy Matthews was the best in F2 ahead of both Harvey and Alex Foster.

Courtney Orme after having a few issues with his car earlier in the evening came good in the GT12 D final to win with Callum Howard, Keith Sutherland and Alwyn Hodges all finishing on the same lap in that order.

The C final saw David Snowden have a good win with Rob Hambridge finishing second after a bit more tweaking to his cars setup. Jack Walsh finished in third place.

Bob Harley took the B final and the best lap time, Matt Popejoy was going very quickly but had to retire from the race leaving Daniel Lacey and Javier Jimenez to fight it out for second and third places, it was a great battle with Daniel finishing ahead by just 0.3 seconds.

The A final had a dramatic start with car 3 Gavin Maciver moving straight into first place on the opening lap closely followed by Louis Parker, Steve Donald and Mark Deacon. Louis was chasing Gavin hard and on lap 10 overtook to take the lead only for Gavin to regain it 2 laps later. Steve was holding on to third place despite Marks best efforts to catch him. Louis was lapping the quickest and gradually eating into Gavin’s lead but could he catch and overtake him. Mark finally moved ahead of Steve on lap 26 to finish in third place. The battle between Louis and Gavin continued and with everyone watching intently got ahead of Gavin on the penultimate lap to win by half a second. Wow, what a finish to a great evenings racing!

Congratulations to all the league winners