Scuderia Ecosse dominated the opening round of the 2005 British GT Championship at Donington Park on April 3rd. Their GT2-class 360 GTCs qualified one and two and pole sitters Nathan Kinch and Andrew Kirkaldy took a resounding first victory, having led the two-hour race from flag-to-flag. Chris Niarchos ran wide in the first corner and dropped back to fourth, gained third place when Caine's Porsche GT3 pulled into the pit lane with a loose wheel. After the pit stop Tim Mullen fought his way back onto the podium, where the two drivers joined their victorious team mates.

Team Principal Stewart Roden said: "I'm delighted with the result; we just need to work harder to get Chris and Tim right up there now. All four drivers did me proud this weekend and, as ever, the whole team worked incredibly hard and deserve this success. All we have to do now is keep the momentum going"!

Damax arrived at Donington Park for the first round of the British GT Championship with two 360s in the GT3 class for Marco Attard/Nick Adams and Miles Hulford /Jamie Smyth. Pre-race testing had identified handling issues which the team sorted out, the cars eventually proving quicker than the Porsches round the corners. Nothing could be done about a straight-line speed deficiency however, the Porkies having benefited from winter engine upgrades from the factory. Hulford then suffered an engine failure, which necessitated an engine change by the mechanics. All this left Hulford/Smyth in 10th place on the grid, with their team-mates down in 13th.

Attard and Smyth started the race for the team, both cars making good progress from the rolling start, although Smyth had to take avoiding action due to an incident on the first lap which lost him a few places but without damage to the car. Attard in the meantime was capitalizing on his good start and was soon up to 2nd in class, with Smyth making his way up to 4th place. Unfortunately it was soon became apparent that Attard had a problem and after 37 laps he brought the car in to the pits with gear selection difficulties. A re-fueling fire then put paid to any chance of continuing.

Its sister car was also having gear selection problems but was now up into 3rd place in class and 10th overall. At just about half distance, Smyth brought the car in to hand over to Hulford, the car emerging still in 3rd place. Despite more gear selection problems, Hulford held onto 3rd place until towards the final 15 minutes when he dropped to 4th coming under pressure from the Vision Marketing, JMH Automotive run 360, which was by now less than a second behind. The car had qualified 7th, but Phil Burton got tapped on the opening lap and spun to the back -20 secs behind everyone else. Burton drove hard for 55 mins making his way back up to 7th before handing over to Ian Flux, who worked his way up to 5th behind Hulford.

Hulford upped his pace to stay ahead of Flux and set the car's fastest lap time of 1:13.57, but Flux too had been suffering gearbox problems for some time with no 3rd gear and erratic changing. On the last lap, he dropped back when the 'box missed a shift and the pair were separated by just 4 seconds at the flag; Hulford/Smyth taking 4th and Burton/Flux 5th in GT3, with the Hector Lester/Allan Simonsen 360 just behind.

Next race: Rounds 3&4 at Magny Cours on 1st May.

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The victorious Scuderia Ecosse 360GTC of Kinch/Kirkaldy

Scuderia Ecosse pit stop

Niarchos/Mullen

Hulford/Smyth (f) & Lester/Simonsen

Burton/Flux

Oops!

pics by British GT