Well here we are as the end of another amazing season fast approaches. I really don’t know where the time has flown to, but I suppose that is a sign of being very active and very busy and whilst I’ve actually had less seat time myself this year: the time I’ve spent working with other drivers as both a driver coach in Formula Ford with Ryan Cullen and a mechanic and all round team helper in karting has meant that I seem to spend most of my days at either a race circuit or a workshop.

I’m really proud of the progress that Ryan has made this season. Not many people realise that he was a complete novice at the start of the year and it was a very steep learning curve for him, but he has worked hard and it has paid off with two great podiums in the last two events of the season at Silverstone and Donington.

This weekend I will be back at Silverstone trying to win another championship: the Protyre Formula Renault BARC Championship to be precise. This has been a great series this year. We’ve had full grids all season and that is set to hit a capacity of 32 cars for our final two rounds supporting the British Touring Car Championship this weekend, where we also have live TV coverage. Some of the best and most highly rated young single-seater talent in the UK has been competing in this championship this season with drivers such as Josh Webster, Seb Morris, Kieran Vernon and David Wagner all battling it out, but now it is down to just two of us who can take the title – myself and Josh.

To be honest I’m highly delighted to be in this position. As is well documented, it was a very late deal, thanks to Cullen Motorsport, that secured my seat in this championship and we really made things hard for ourselves by not getting in any pre-season testing and having a number of reliability issues with the car at the start of the season; but this was purely down to circumstances. I was also warned not to expect too much. Josh being a third year driver in this championship with a number of wins already under his belt was rightly the title favourite and with all the other top drivers having done a pre-season testing programme we were clearly going to be on the back foot especially as were running in a new team with very limited data. One or two other people also thought that I would find it hard to adapt from Formula Ford but I wasn’t so concerned about this. Although I hadn’t driven a Formula Renault before I had already tested both GP3 and Formula Two so I felt I had some good experience of aero.

So I’m really looking forward to the weekend and whichever way it goes it’s been another great year regardless. I’m not particularly thinking about the championship, I’m mainly thinking it’s an opportunity to go and out and try to take two more wins which is really what motor racing is all about.  I’d like to wish good luck (but not too much) to all the other competitors this weekend, particularly my new team mate Ryan Cullen who will make his “aero” race debut – hope you have a good one and let’s put on a good show for the TV cameras and demonstrate to the BTCC fans what they have been missing all season by not having any single-=seaters on the bill!

If any of you reading are at Silverstone this weekend then be sure to pop by and say hello.

I’ll be blogging again soon.

All the best,

Scott.

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