Hillspeed’s Guinchard stays top of driver standings after strong showing at Snetterton

Racing to third place in round 10 on Saturday afternoon at the Norfolk venue, Guinchard went one better in round 11 on Sunday morning – just missing out on the win by 0.4 seconds following a last lap attempt at grabbing the lead – and then capped the event with seventh place in round 12. He departs Snetterton leading the championship by 36 points, and also set fastest lap in races one and two.

Following two days of testing the serious action of qualifying came on Saturday morning where the Hillspeed team-mates locked out the second row of the grid for race one of the weekend. Juncos produced his best showing so far with third fastest, a time of 1m47.177 seconds, while Guinchard was fourth with a time of 1m47.269 seconds.

At the start of round 10 later in the afternoon Guinchard managed to launch well enough to move into third ahead of the sister car on the run to Riches, with Juncos emerging from the right-hander in fifth position. The American-Argentine racer had erroneously crept before the lights went out and so stood on the brakes, thus impacting his actual launch from the grid and resulting in a 10 second time penalty.

Guinchard stayed very close to the lead pair of cars for the majority of the race, and set the fastest lap of 1m48.231 seconds on the sixth tour, before wisely opting to settle for third towards the end. Juncos harried the fourth place car but remained in fifth position to the conclusion on lap 10, the time penalty frustratingly dropping him to 10th position on corrected times.

Second best times from Saturday’s qualifying placed Guinchard third on the grid for round 11 on Sunday, with Juncos having had to settle for a spot on the fifth row – losing a lap time for track limits in qualifying which might have delivered a front row or second row start. Guinchard started the race well, instantly rocketing into second, and he remained close behind the lead car for the first few laps.

Redoubling his efforts into the second half of the race, he set fastest lap on the sixth tour and piled pressure onto the leader – chief championship rival Ary Bansal – before making a couple of serious attempts at a pass on the 10th and final tour. In the end, Guinchard took the flag just 0.4 seconds shy. Guinchard said: “Around here especially we thought it was going to be a really tricky weekend, so to actually extend the championship lead overall was really positive – the team have done a fantastic job. We’ve got to take every opportunity we can get, keeping our nose clean has been such a big part of it this year so I’m glad to have scored some more points.”