Mitchell Hale leads the Formula Renault BARC Championship at the halfway point of the season after taking a pair of top-six finishes on the third of six race weekends this season.
The Bristol teenager finished sixth in both races at the Croft circuit in North Yorkshire, meaning that he continues as top dog in the championship in this, his maiden season of single-seater racing.
Unfortunately, this proved to be the least competitive weekend of the 2010 season for Hale, who is driving for the Fortec Motorsport team and entered the weekend having won races at Brands Hatch and Silverstone. He was unable to test at Croft in the weeks leading up to the races, meaning that he was at a disadvantage over others who had got some running in at the track.
Hale qualified fourth for the first race and fifth for the second, and was disappointed to slip back slightly in both races.
“It would have been nice to extend the championship lead this weekend, but it was damage-limitation really,” said Hale. “We just weren’t fast enough this weekend and didn’t have the pace.”
The first race was characterised by a very strong wind and Mitchell, who switched to single-seaters this season after a learning year in the Ginetta Junior sportscar series in 2009, found this to be a new experience.
“It was mental!” he said. “I couldn’t believe what a difference the wind made to the handling of the car. At the first corner of the first lap I went in too fast for the wind, and I went wide and off the track, but I came back on so it was OK.”
Hale showed what might have been by posting the second fastest lap of the race, but was unable to emulate that in the second race, when he again ran on the fringes of the top six.
“We had a problem in the last few laps,” he said. “We don’t really know what’s wrong, but it felt like a brake pad might be sticking coming out of the corners.”
With a championship points system that rewards consistent finishing, Mitchell’s two sixth-place finishes from Croft will likely prove extremely important by the end of the season. “If someone had offered me the mid-season championship lead before we turned up at the first race I’d have taken that!” he said.
Next round is at Snetterton in Norfolk in four weeks’ time, on the weekend of July 31/August 1. Snetterton is a circuit at which Hale has shown very strongly in testing, so he is looking forward to a strong result. “We’ve done some testing there and I’m fast at Snetterton, so it should be a good weekend,” he said.
