Bradley Smith feels he is set for a “very hard” meeting at Croft this weekend as both he and his Mectech Motorsport team make their first visit to the Yorkshire circuit in the Michelin Ginetta GT4 Supercup.
A late entrant into the series, multiple Radical champion Smith has become a firm top six contender in the Supercup over the last few meetings and has a maiden podium finish in his sights, but feels his chances of doing so at Croft are limited.
“Croft is going to be very hard weekend. We have never visited the track and time restrictions means we won’t get a chance to,” he said.
“We have to make the most of our Friday practice and hopefully we can go into the races with a competitive package. It is frustrating catching up to the other teams but we have a steep development curve and hopefully it will pay off soon”
The Croft visit comes after a frustrating outing at Oulton Park last time out, where top five qualifying pace went unrewarded in the races following a mechanical failure in the opening encounter.
Benefitting from his only test day of the year so far prior to the meeting, Smith qualified just four tenths of a second shy of pole position in fifth place – though felt there was more to come.
“We didn’t have the luxury in the Friday test of doing lots of practice qualifying laps on new tyre like some of the other teams, it was my first flying laps so I don’t think I made the most out of the tyre,” he commented.
Unfortunately, a broken CV joint on the green flag lap meant that Smith couldn’t make the start of race one. With the problem rectified before race two, Smith made an impressive charge through the field from eighteenth on the grid to finish eighth.
“It was great fun coming through the field,” he added. “The Supercup is a close field and the racing is hard, so with only fifteen laps I knew I had to push hard from the start. Mectech gave me a great car and was good to overtake on a circuit which isn’t the easiest to get by people.”
