Wow. We are back! 2025 is well and truly go after a long pre-season full of preparation and anticipation.
Donington was really a weekend of two halves for us. On Saturday, we had FP1 and FP2 where we still weren’t so sure where we would stack up overall but after trusting the process and working extremely well with my engineer we ended up qualifying 5th on the grid for the season opener! A result I was admittedly surprised with as we haven’t had the strongest package overall in terms of our straight line speed performance but that will only improve. Making the Q3 shootout was always an aim of mine and I was really proud to have been able to deliver that.
Onto Raceday and one that became more arduous than we’d hoped. I brought the car home in P5 again for Race 1, an incredibly fair result after driving extremely well to maintain position and show again how good a job we are doing. The chassis is brilliant, we are just lacking some horses under the bonnet for the time being which makes it harder in race situations to fight and it gave me a lot more to do to keep up with the cars around which again really cemented how strong a performance we displayed in Race 1. Sadly, we were awarded a 10 second time penalty for a jump start – incredibly tight and we felt pretty hard done by as from my perspective it just felt like I’d timed it to absolute perfection.
Lining up P13 for Race 2 as a consequence was only going to make our day harder. This was a disaster of a race with a horrendous brake issue causing me to float around three seconds off the pace and have no choice but to bring the car home safely. We then just had to go all guns blazing in Race 3 and do the best we could from the back and fortunately, we did. Finishing P14 and the winner of the Jack Sears Trophy for the weekend was a good consolation overall for our efforts but certainly not what we had in mind after such a strong start to the weekend.
This gives me a lot to carry forward into Brands Hatch now in under two weeks’ time where we hope to achieve some big things off the back of our Saturday performance at the weekend.
I want to give a massive thank you to you all for the support and believing in me. It’s incredible to be back and this would not be possible without you! Let’s keep pushing!
Ronan Pearson
