Five Junos Placed In The Top Seven Of VdeV UK Opener
Juno Racing made a great start to the new VdeV UK Championship held at Donington Park with five of their six cars finishing in the top seven.
Juno Racing ran Rob Croydon & Adrian Mardlin, in their VdeV EU Championship winning Juno SSE-CN, Neill Briggs & Andreas Halkiopoulos and Dave Mountain & Will Curtis. The team where also on hand to offer support to other teams running the Junos of Graham Fennymore & Chris Bialan, Duncan Williams & Tony Freeman and Sarah Reader & Ryan Hooker.
With rain always threatening, the start to the race seemed even more hectic for the field of twenty-one cars than usual. Included in those spinning in the early laps of the race was Duncan Williams; emulating his partner Tony Freeman who had showed great pace in qualifying, he battled back from the rear of the field to hand over, at the driver change-over in 2nd place. But with two punctures and a master cylinder failure they went back down the field and then out of the race. With all the ifs, buts and maybes associated with racing, it was a disappointing end to a race that they had a good chance of winning.
Meanwhile, with the remaining five Junos having made relentless progress and with forty-five minutes to go, Graham Fennymore was leading the race. Rob Croydon was 2nd, Andreas Halkiopoulos was 3rd, Sarah Reader 6th and Will Curtis 7th. A safety car at forty minutes to go played to Rob Garofall’s advantage who took the lead from Graham in a strong charge.
The final standings saw the Juno runners finish: 2nd Fennymore/Bialan, 3rd Croydon/Mardlin, 4th Briggs/ Halkiopoulos, 5th Reader/Hooker and 7th Mountain/Curtis.
It was an excellent Juno weekend and Team boss Ewan Baldry was justifiably delighted. “We had four first-time partnerships running Junos in this race, some with little experience of endurance racing. Chris Bialan drove out of his skin in the first part of the race and Graham matched the speed of the professional drivers throughout.
“With such a finishing line-up you can imagine how pleased I am” he concluded.
The next VdeV-UK round takes place at Anglesey on 18 May.
