JTR Motorsport are celebrating a bittersweet victory in the Dunlop MSA Formula Ford Championship of Great Britain. Max Marshall took his second win of the season in the second of three races at Rockingham but only after his team mate Jayde Kruger, who equalised with championship leader Harrison Scott in race 1, retired with fuel pump issues. The Falcon Motorsport run championship leader took third in the race, reopening the points gap and putting Krugers title hopes in doubt.
The fuel pump failure struck cruelly on lap two of the race, stranding Kruger and relieving the immediate pressure on Scott’s team mate Ricky Collard who fought a running defensive engagement with Marshall for three laps. Marshall made the pass in Speedway 1, before cementing the overtake at the Deene Hairpin with perfectly timed braking.
“Yesterday I went around him there on the outside,” Marshall explained, “and I tried it twice again today before deciding it wasn’t going to pay off, so I held back and picked my moment. He went to the inside and I went out and he didn’t defend because he thought I wasn’t going to go for it; at the last minute I made my move and got him under braking.”
A lap later the safety car was out to allow the recovery of a stricken MBM Motorsport Mygale. Michael O’Brien had come off worse in a battle with Chris Mealin in the third Falcon machine and the marshals were hard at work. It took four laps to clear the car before action resumed.
The restart saw Collard drop like a stone from second to fourth as first Ashley Sutton, team mate to the stricken O’Brien, then Harrison Scott blasted past. Collard later admitted he had changed down too many gears and became stuck in neutral. Marshall meanwhile shot away from the pack, opening up a 1.6 second lead by the end of the first green flag lap.
Sutton was forced to battle rising temperatures in the cockpit of his machine. The team suspect a stone pierced the radiator, though the MBM man still managed to claim the scholarship class victory along with second place.
Collard’s fourth place behind Scott came after a real ding-dong battle with the Richardson Racing entry of Louise Richardson, Radical Motorsport’s James Abbott and the JTR newcomer Clay Mitchell. Richardson took fifth place ahead of Mitchell after both out dragged the Radical machine to the line. Abbott headed his team mate Juan Rosso who struggled with damage to his suspension and clutch following contact with a curb earlier in the race.
SWB Motorsport’s Greg Holloway rounded out the top ten after a quick tyre change between the formation lap and the start due to a puncture.
