Ollie Chadwick didn’t make it easy for himself, but he managed to convert a dominant pole position into a less than dominant victory in the first Ginetta GT5 Challenge race of the weekend at Snetterton.
Indeed it was the man who started in second place, James Kellett, that got past the Xentek Motorsport driver going into Riches for the first time and would hold onto the lead for the first three laps.
Going onto lap four, Chadwick used the slipstreaming effect to best use down the start/finish straight to get into the lead before the first corner.
From then, his lead was hardly considerable as he couldn’t escape Kellet’s attentions, the widest gap he had was only half-a-second at its biggest and by the time they crossed the line only one-tenth separated them.
For Kellett, he will be grateful he could remain in second and not see his lead at the head of the points table not reduced by too much, but now Chadwick will be hoping to carry on this run of form for the rest of the weekend.
Behind them, Callum Pointon found himself running alone – 14 seconds behind the leaders, and five seconds ahead of fourth place – to ease himself into a podium finish.
The reason fourth couldn’t catch up was because of the fighting between Luca Hirst in fifth and Matt Palmer in fourth. For many laps, Hirst was getting his nose up the inside but Palmer was closing the door, towards the end of the race finally managed to make a move stick and found himself up into fourth place.
Simpson in sixth and Elshimmy in seventh also had a good scrap, with Elshimmy looking likely to steal the place, unfortunately for him he couldn’t get a move to stick.
