Plowman Gunning for Spa Podium

Martin Plowman has set his sights on a podium finish at this weekend’s Spa 24 Hours as the MRS GT team look to close the deficit to fellow Nissan outfit RJN. The 27-year-old, who will be sporting a new red livery on the no. 73 GTR-NISMO this weekend, is targeting a clean run after mechanical issues eliminated the all-British crew from podium contention the last time out at Paul Ricard.

Godzilla will look suitably mean on track at Spa (David Lord).

“Whether it’s realistic or not, a podium is our aim, but we would take a top ten,” says Plowman. “The test went well for us at Spa, but you can never really read too much into that because some guys were sandbagging and some weren’t dialled in. I’ll reserve any judgement until race week when people started putting laps down in anger.

“The race is such a lottery and it’s one of those that can come down to reliability and not necessarily being the quickest car. Any team that runs smoothly with no issues, doesn’t get caught up in crashes, penalties or have any mechanical problems is instantly going to be considered for the top five. First and foremost we need to focus on making sure the car is bullet-proof and that the drivers stay out of trouble, after that hopefully we’ll be in good shape.”

With certain niggles inherent to the homologation of the car hampering MRS in both the Sprint and Endurance championships, Plowman, Craig Dolby and Sean Walkinshaw have struggled to hit the same heights as the RJN team, which qualified on pole at Silverstone and took victory at Paul Ricard. But removing qualifying from the equation, Plowman believes that their race pace is comparable and will materialise into good results with more experience in the car, starting with the Spa 24 Hours.

Dolby and Walkinshaw have featured strongly at times in
 the Sprint Series, seen here in Moscow (Olivier Beroud).

“So far, we’ve had better pace at tracks where we didn’t think we’d be strong and our pace at tracks where we thought we’d be strong wasn’t quite what we were expecting,” he says. “It’s such a competitive series that if you miss the setup or the Balance of Performance isn’t right, you can easily end up in 30^th place, but equally it doesn’t take a lot to swing a weekend from being below average to being a great weekend.

“There have been plenty of times when we have had the race pace to beat the RJN car, but we just don’t have the qualifying pace yet to get us in a good starting position. But for the Spa 24 Hours the qualifying position is even less important than it would be for a six or a three hour race, so even if we don’t get the qualifying right for this weekend, I would hope that our race pace would pull us through and barring any mechanical issues we should end up where we deserve to be.”