The Simpson Race Products Ginetta Junior Championship produced a dramatic, controversial and action-packed set of three races at Knockhill last weekend, and we’ve crunched the numbers to find the key statistics and landmarks from the weekend’s action.
The milestone performances started in qualifying on Saturday as Seb Priaulx secured his maiden championship pole position in his JHR Developments Ginetta G40.
The result sees Priaulx become the fifth different pole-sitter this season and remarkably the fourteenth separate man to top qualifying in the last seventeen sessions.
Priaulx was one of three drivers to record their best ever qualifying performance in Scotland, with Geri Nicosia securing the fifth fastest time and Connor Grady the tenth.
Stuart Middleton and Will Tregurtha finished the session third and fourth respectively meanwhile, the first time this year at least one of the two hasn’t qualified on the front row.
Come the races and it was Seb Perez and Geri Nicosia who burst into the spotlight as they both secured their maiden podium finishes in the championship with outright race victories.
For Nicosia, his breakthrough podium could be compared to London buses, as after waiting for one, two came along at once as he added a third place in the final race of the weekend.
Perez’s victory meanwhile came with the biggest winning margin of the season so far at 4.670 seconds, with the next highest coming the next day with Tregurtha’s 2.920s success.
There were plenty of new faces on the overall podium across the weekend, with Tom Wood and Grady also securing their top three breakthroughs in races two and three respectively.
Twelve different drivers have now featured on the overall podium in the seventeen races so far, which is already more than throughout 2015 when eleven drivers graced the rostrum.
Nicosia, Perez, Collard And Wood Were Amongst The Happy New Faces On The Podium – Credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography
In similar fashion to their qualifying stat, the second race of the weekend was the first this season not to feature either Middleton or Tregurtha on the podium.
Those two drivers did feature in the top three in races one and three respectively however, meaning they have both reached double figures for podium finishes this season with ten apiece.
Alongside Perez, Nicosia, Grady and Wood, two other drivers posted their best results of the season so far, with Jordan Collard taking fifth, while Charlie Digby secured sixteenth in all three races.
For Collard that overall top five result also brought with it a first Rookie Cup victory, with the Total Control Racing man’s maiden class podium having come earlier in the weekend as well.
Collard and Wood’s breakthrough results also mean that an incredible eighteen different drivers have finished inside the outright top six this campaign.
The weekend did feature the smallest grid of the season so far however, with absences for Kyle Hornby, Tom Gamble, Max Bird and others meaning only seventeen cars battled it out in Scotland.
All seventeen of them were classified finishers in each of the three action-packed races however. To put that in perspective, only two other races this season haven’t featured a retirement.
The competitiveness at the front of the field was showcased in race two as four different drivers led a lap over the course of the encounter, the most different leaders of a single race this year.
None of those four drivers were the classified race winner however, with Nicosia taking the strange honour of having won a race without actually leading a lap so far in his Junior career.
Tregurtha’s race three success meanwhile has moved him to the top of the charts for laps and miles led, with 47 laps at a total of 89.117 miles just edging him ahead of Middleton in both charts.
The 2016 Simpson Race Products Ginetta Junior Championship is back in action next weekend (27/28 August) with a triple-header meeting at Rockingham in Corby.
