Tom Oliphant has expressed his delight after a dominant weekend in the Michelin Ginetta GT4 Supercup at Croft has cut his deficit to championship leader Carl Breeze by over half.
The Century Motorsport ace was the dominant force in Yorkshire this past weekend, topping practice on Friday before setting a pole time in qualifying over eight tenths of a second quicker than his closest competitor.
Oliphant lost the lead at the start of race one to Michael Caine, but after pressuring him for a number of laps he slid past at the hairpin for the lead four laps from the finish for the opening race win.
That put him on pole again for race two and there were no mistakes off the line this time around, the 24 year old storming clear of the pack to build a lead of over three seconds within four laps, which he held for the remainder of the race for his third victory of 2015 so far.
Race three saw Oliphant arguably produce his most impressive drive of the weekend though, after a mysterious engine cut out on lap one forced him to restart his Ginetta G55, putting him over nine seconds adrift of the back of the field.
From there, Oliphant set blistering pace to climb through the field into third place with four laps to go, before closing down a seven second gap to Reece Somerfield ahead to challenge him on the final tour, with a drag race out of the hairpin to the chequered flag going Somerfield’s way by just 0.043s.
The results mean Oliphant, who also set the fastest lap in races two and three, has moved from 82 points off Breeze’s championship lead to just 36 heading into the second half of the season.
“It’s been a fantastic weekend, I couldn’t have really asked for any more. We had so much pace across the meeting and I’m really happy with the point’s haul we gained, beating our title rivals in all three races,” said Oliphant.
“Hats off have to go to the team, they’ve worked long and hard with me to get the set-up right and it all came together this weekend. I’m a bit gutted that the engine cut out in race three really, as we showed we had the pace to take a clean sweep of the victories, but these things happen.”
