Jordan King found himself out-of-luck once again as the 2011 Formula Renault UK Championship visited the celebrated ‘Home of British Motor Racing’, Silverstone – with a disobedient wing mirror and an ambitious rival scuppering his chances of coming away with a podium finish.
Jordan arrived at the famous British Grand Prix venue fired-up to achieve a strong result having been denied a deserved breakthrough Formula Renault UK victory a fortnight earlier at Snetterton, where he had been unceremoniously shunted out of the lead less than a lap-and-a-half from the chequered flag. He was optimistic about his prospects of making amends.
“When we’d tested at Silverstone back at the start of the season, I had been inside the top five,” revealed the talented young Warwickshire car racing rookie, “and I knew I had improved a lot since then, so I was feeling pretty confident going into the weekend. I really enjoy driving the track – it’s the only proper F1 circuit in the country and the longest on the calendar, and it usually generates some good racing. It’s just an awesome place to be, especially with all the prestige surrounding it and with being a BRDC Rising Star, too.”
Lapping second-quickest during practice in his Manor Competition single-seater – and fastest Graduate Cup contender to-boot – was an excellent start, and all looked set for a front-running performance in qualifying, but unfortunately, a number of factors would conspire against the highly-rated Stoneleigh-based speed demon.
“Some of the drivers were racing in the Formula Renault Eurocup over the weekend as well, so they had benefitted from a lot more track time than the rest of us when we got to qualifying,” Jordan explained. “That was a big advantage for them, and also, the conditions changed a little bit between practice and qualifying, which meant our set-up was no longer 100 per cent right and my driving wasn’t perfect either – and with the Silverstone GP layout being such a long lap, a little bit of lost time quickly adds up to quite a lot.”
Lining up seventh for race one and sixth for race two, the 17-year-old Princethorpe College student was convinced a top three spot would have been on the cards had only everything come together – and as it was, he missed out by a mere four tenths of a second. From there, Jordan conceded, it would be a case of ‘damage limitation, to just try to make as much progress as we could’.
“I got a decent start and held my position,” he recalled of the opening encounter, “and heading into the new section halfway around the first lap, I gained a place to move into sixth – but then a couple of laps later, my right-hand side wing mirror fell out of its casing. Someone went up the inside of me, but because I couldn’t see them coming, I didn’t defend. That cost me quite a bit of time, and I lost several places due to it.
“It was weird driving without the mirror – it was like there was a big black hole in my vision. I recovered one position, but then the gap to the group in front was too big – I was closing it down slowly, but there wasn’t enough time to make a difference and we ended up eighth. We were a little bit off pace-wise, but what we had was still raceable and without the wing mirror issue we could probably have fought for the top five.
“In race two, I got a really good start off the line to move immediately up to fourth, but then somebody went to the inside of me into the first corner and pushed me out very wide onto the grass – and because it was so slippery, I fell all the way down to the bottom of the order.
“I focussed on working my way back, though, overtook some drivers and some others crashed, which lifted me to ninth. I caught the pack ahead by the end of the race, too, but they all defended well so there was no way past. That was frustrating again, because we definitely had the pace to have finished on the podium.”
That much was ably borne out by the statistics – Jordan impressively setting the second-best time in the last sector of the lap, beaten only by the runaway race-winner – but the Hugo Boss brand ambassador at least has an immediate opportunity to bounce back, with his third outing in the Formula Renault Northern European Cup at Most in the Czech Republic this weekend.
“Overall, it was disappointing really,” he concluded of Silverstone. “Our speed was good in the end, but we were damaged by the comparative lack of running earlier on – we just lacked a little bit of consistency, and we didn’t come away with a result. I’ve driven Most on a simulator, and from what I can tell, the track looks really good fun. We had the pace for two podiums in the last Northern European Cup meeting at Zandvoort and came so close to achieving that, so we’ve got to be aiming to put that right this time around.”
