2025 Miata Trophy Round 3 Brands Hatch GP Review: Progress, Progress & Barrier Damage...

Reflecting on Brands Hatch last weekend is a difficult one really for me. On one side, the results weren't really what I wanted, and didn't really have the race pace to go with the front group. But on the other hand, I got to drive what can only be described as one of the most spectacular old school race tracks for the first time ever, and the actual car speed through the weekend until race 1 was very very positive! It gives me a lot of hope for the remainder of the season, especially with Donington Park coming up next.

Wednesday was actually the start of the race weekend for Brands Hatch as the Friday test day we usually do was only on the Indy circuit, which for a weekend of the GP circuit wasn't much use, especially for someone thats never done the GP! The Wednesday session did lead to what felt like a very "broken" race weekend, having to head back home Wednesday night, back to work till Friday then back to Brands to go straight into Qualifying Saturday morning.

The one familiar thing to the test day was we were back to 4 sessions of 30mins driving to get dialled in.

For the first session it was all about aclimatising to the extremely fast GP loop, which I had been told was fast, but my god, the first time I went through Hawthorns I realised I could carry a huge amount more speed than I thought! Through the session I eventually built up the lap times to start getting down to a more competitive time before focusing on car speed for the rest of the day.

Session 2 we started to really fine tune the car for the circuit and by the time we had completed session 3 the car was more or less there having dialled out some oversteer that I'd been struggling with. Then for the final session we bolted on the new tyres and found a real sweet spot with the car... we were ready for Saturday. Parking the car after 4 laps in the final session to save the car for Qualifying.

Qualifying on Saturday was late morning, thankfully! After being on the circuit scales for Silverstone, we were back on the championship scales and found ourselves needing some additional weight in the car before Qualifying. Whether this had an affect on how the car behaved compared to Wednesday I am not sure, but the confidence I had in the rear of the car wasn't as good as it had been.

The opening 2 laps were ok but not great, until the red flag came out, making a short session around a long lap even shorter.

Once the session got going again, I set a few laps in clean air but didn't really hook up a lap so I went to try and get a bit of a tow. The first lap I got blocked twice on what was a promising lap, then the next attempt I found myself at the front of the pack again and made a handful of fairly big mistakes, but ultimately this was my quickest lap. I managed to line myself up for the perfect tow behind Cossins only for the chequered flag to come out and the session to end. I ended up in P8, but with the feeling P3 was possible.

Race 1 started perfectly, gaining 2 places going around the outside of Paddock Hill Bend to jump up to 6th before a certain Mr Aidan Hills appeared from 14th on the grid, following a gearbox issue in Qualifying, and demoted me to 7th place. From there I would say the pack settled down, but it was all happening in front of me, with Declan Lee doing a really good rally driving impression multiple times through Hawthorns dropping him down behind me before getting me back as I seemed to be really struggling with the rear of the car on corner entry.

After I had dropped back down to 7th there was what can only be desribed as the worlds slowest lap behind the safety car, doing a close to 5mins lap as we barely got above 40kph, We eventually got back going again but with the balance issues, even after a good restart it was more about hanging onto 7th rather than looking ahead, which I fortunately just managed to do as I crossed the line.

We then had a long wait for race 2, with us being the last session of the day so there was plenty of the normal prep being done between sessions and a small change to try and fix the handling issues I was having.

We were all down in the assembly area ready for race 2 when we heard what can only be described as a very expensive crunch, with a collision between 2 GT cars in the GT cup which resulted in barrier damage that could not be fixed in time for us to get any form of meaningful race in before the 6:30 curfew, so the decision was made not to race. A frustrating end to the weekend when I would have been starting 3rd, but these things happen and we move onto Donington in July.

We have a bit of a summer break now before Donington in July, but hopefully we can sneak some extra track time in to get ready for the home race! Thank you to all my sponsors and everyone that came to visit and support me over the weekend!

See you at Donington!

Jack