Jamie Caroline leads the way in the 2015 Kick Start Energy Ginetta Junior Championship as we head into a potentially pivotal penultimate meeting of the season this weekend at Silverstone.
Caroline regained his points lead with a double victory last time out at Rockingham, but despite eight wins in the last ten races, the HHC Motorsport driver’s margin at the top is only 26 points over Senna Proctor with four races remaining.
Early pace-setter Proctor got back to the top of the standings at Knockhill last month, however unfortunate contact with team-mate Dan Zelos at Rockingham lost him ground – an incident he’ll be keen to bounce back from to extend his run of four podium finishes in the last five races.
One of the stars of recent meetings has been Lewis Brown, with a run of ten consecutive top six finishes, capped off by three podiums in the last four encounters, moving him up to third in the championship standings.
Brown surpassed JHR Developments duo Zelos and Billy Monger for the top three. A rough spell has seen Monger not finish in the top four since a star Snetterton weekend, while Zelos is still chasing a first win of the campaign, so expect both to be pushing hard this time out.
Outside of the outright title battle, there is also a fascinating scrap developing for the Rookie Cup honours between Patrik Matthiesen and Stuart Middleton. The latter took a pair of class wins and outright second places at Rockingham to close the gap to seven points, with Matthiesen needing to put an inconsistent second half of the season so far behind him to keep his rival at bay.
The competitiveness of the 2015 Junior season is highlighted by the fact eight different drivers have taken the eight pole positions on offer so far this season, with the latest to join the roll call being Devlin DeFrancesco in only his fourth ever Junior qualifying.
The HHC Motorsport man has shown his pace in practice and qualifying so far and is one to watch as he tries to improve on his best race finish of seventh so far, while his fellow late-starter and team-mate Charlie Fagg has settled into the series well with four top ten finishes in the last five races.
R&J Motorsport duo Jonathan Hadfield and Kyle Hornby will be keen to put tough Rockingham outings behind them and return to the sharp end of the grid this weekend, likewise Will Tregurtha who missed the competitive action following a nasty practice incident.
Matt Chapman will be hoping to turn four consecutive top seven finishes into a breakthrough top four result this time out, while his Total Control Racing stablemate Dave Wooder will be keen to cement himself as a top six regular following his seasons best sixth at Rockingham.
Alex Day, Geri Nicosia, Ben Green, Sebastian Perez, Will Stacey and Cameron Roberts have all featured in the top ten at points this season, while Frankie Bird, Esmee Hawkey, Rowan Bailey and Connor Grady will be battling it out to join the 21 different drivers who have taken a top ten finish so far this campaign.
The action at Silverstone kicks off with official testing on Friday, before the grid gets one more chance to fine tune their set-ups in Saturday morning practice (11:00) ahead of qualifying (14:05). A busy Saturday sees the opening race follow later than afternoon (16:30), with race two to be televised live on ITV4 on Sunday (11:15).
Full championship standings ahead of the weekend can be found here.
