> Jones and Malvern also swap to Silverstone-winning Mercedes-AMG GT4
Team Parker Racing has added a second Porsche 911 to its GTC line-up for the Intelligent Money British GT Championship’s final round this weekend at Silverstone where 2013 GT4 champion Ryan Ratcliffe partners series debutant Justin Armstrong.
Armstrong and Ratcliffe join Karl Leonard and Tim Bridgman in Parker’s GTC garage, while full-season entrants Nick Jones and Scott Malvern swap over to the same GT4-spec Mercedes-AMG with which they scored class victory at Silverstone in 2019.
Ratcliffe and Armstrong currently race in separate Porsche Carrera Cup GB categories but will combine for the first time against a GTC field also featuring their team-mates and three Ferrari 488 Competizione models.
Armstrong previously raced a TPR-run Caterham and now steps up to British GT aboard the same Parker-prepared Porsche as he campaigns in PCCGB’s Am class.
“It’s been a busy and interesting year in the Carrera Cup compared to what I was used to in Caterham but it’s also been a lot of fun and I really feel like I have gotten to grips with the car and how to get the most out of it as the season has gone on,” he said.
“The opportunity came up to race in the British GT Championship and I thought ‘well, why not?’ You don’t often get a chance to race against such a diverse grid of cars and drivers and it will be a really good learning experience as I try new things. It would be nice to get a good result, but mostly we’ll be trying to enjoy ourselves and make the most of a long afternoon of racing.”
Ratcliffe, meanwhile, joined PCCGB at the start of 2020 following seven years in British GT3 and GT4. He remains in Pro-Am title contention ahead of the one-make championship’s mid-November season finale but couldn’t resist returning to his old stomping ground, albeit in an unfamiliar class.
“I thought I should do a race: I’ve done it for the past seven years and I don’t want to break the streak!” said the Welshman. “My aim is to go out there and annoy the GT3 cars as we should be as fast as them in a straight line, but we have no ABS or traction control in the corners. There should be some good pairings in GTC, including Tim and Karl in our own team, so they will be the ones to benchmark ourselves against.
“In the Carrera Cup team we’ve all talked about how great it would be to drive together because we get on well and Justin mentioned doing it at Snetterton, so I expressed an interest and he sent me a text and I bit his hand off. He has shown some great pace and come on leaps and bounds in the car, so I think we’ll have a good weekend.”
Further GT3 and GT4 entries will be announced on Tuesday before the #Silverstone500 grid – comfortably British GT’s largest of the season – is revealed in full on Wednesday morning.
Covid measures will prevent spectators from attending British GT’s #SilverstoneShowdown. However, fans around the world can watch the three-hour season finale live on British GT’s Facebook page and website, as well as SRO’s GT World Youtube channel, from 12:45 GMT on November 8.