Will Bratt is currently 5th in the FIA Formula 2 Championship, and is hoping that his misfortunes from the previous rounds are banished by a high points scoring finish this weekend at Brands Hatch. Bratt was hit by a driveshaft failure in Portimão in the first race while in the second race a damaged front wing prevented him from challenging for the podium. During the previous event at Zolder, contact ruled him out of race one but battled through race 2 to come in fifth.
Speaking about this coming weekend Bratt said, “We've had a fair amount of misfortune this year which has had a big impact but I'm aiming to turn that around at Brands, it'll be good to be back there”, said Will, “The last time I raced on the GP track was back in 2005 in Formula Renault UK. I enjoyed it then and I'm looking forward to driving the F2 car there at the weekend.”
Brands Hatch is the second British event of the season, and Bratt heads into this weekend 5th in the Championship, with only 8 points separating him, Philipp Eng and Benjamin Bailly, with Jolyon Palmer and Dean Stoneman topping the table. “There's still half the season to go so if Jolyon and Dean have a couple of bad weekends and I have some very good ones, the whole title picture will change. We have to start turning things around so the main way to achieve that is to relax, hopefully have no problems and deliver the sort of performances we know we can” said Bratt “Without the bad luck we've had so far this year, I know we would be quite comfortably clear of Eng, Bailly and (Kazim) Vasiliauskas in the points. Hopefully we can have two strong races at Brands, move back into the championship top three and make some inroads on the leaders.”
He looks like this weekend could be his for the taking. In the F2 test at Brands Hatch earlier in the week, Bratt topped the first 2 sessions with leads of 0.3s and 0.4s respectively. He could have made it 3, had he not been pipped at the post in the dying minutes. “It was a really good day overall, we were on it all day and everything felt great”, said Will,speaking about is impressive form “The last session is always a bit unpredictable with the overboost but we were very strong in that run and headed the first two sessions quite comfortably so I'm very happy. The best thing about the test is that we were up there in the times all day. We benefited from some good experience in the wet during the morning – that was important as it's possible we could have some rain at the weekend – and then in session two everything went really well. To head the second run by four 10ths of a second was good going.”
Bratt knows exactly how important this weekend will be, “The Brands Hatch races are going to be really important, we need to carry forward the level of performance we've shown in this test and deliver it in qualifying and both races which I'm confident we can do.”
