This year will be Jones and Malvern’s seventh British GT season as a pairing, and their third with the Porsche 911 GT3 R, which will again be run by Team Parker Racing.
Despite some mid-season damage effectively ruling them out of two rounds last season, Jones and Malvern still showed flashes of their potential, with the #66 SD teams Porsche featuring strongly in both the practice and qualifying times, including Malvern bagging an outright pole position at Oulton Park. Indeed, their strongest weekend of the season came at the Cheshire track where they went on to claim an outright podium finish and a fifth place from the two hour-long sprint races.
This time around, with Oulton Park reverting to its traditional Easter weekend slot, Jones and Malvern are hoping to use the two one-hour races as a springboard toward a competitive season in which they hope to improve on their 10th place finish in the drivers’ championship last season.
Nick Jones said: “I’m really looking forward to getting back into the car at Oulton Park. Admittedly our pre-season preparation hasn’t been as strong as we’d have liked – for a number of reasons – but we did get to sample the car on the new Pirelli tyres for a test at Portimão in Portugal and we’ll have some running on Friday to get up to speed. The grid this year is looking very competitive, so we’re not expecting miracles, but Oulton Park was kind to us last season and it would be great to hit the ground running this year. We’ve got consistency on the engineering side and we learned a lot about the Porsche across last season, so we’re not starting from scratch this year. A GT3 car around Oulton Park is an incredible experience, so whatever happens we’ll be smiling.”
Scott Malvern added: “We’re certainly not as prepared as we’d like to be, but we can still go into Oulton Park with some high hopes. We made really good progress with the Porsche last year, and Nick’s driving came on a lot too, so hopefully we can just pick up from where we left off. Oulton is an incredible circuit, really fast and flowing, and the Porsche should be strong out of the slower corners. We’ve got some extra weight to carry in the balance of performance, so we’re not sure exactly where we’ll sit against the other brands, but we’ll be giving it our all regardless. The new tyres for this year are very different, they’re a harder compound and have less drop-off in performance, so I can see some lap records falling this year. Hopefully we can be in the mix for some of those.”
The opening round of the Intelligent Money British GT Championship gets underway with two free practice sessions on Saturday April 16 before qualifying begins at 16:00. Both races are set for Easter Monday, with the opening round starting at 11:20 and race two at 16:10. All sessions will feature live timing via TSL Timing, and both qualifying and the races will be streamed live via the British GT website and GT World YouTube channel.
