Racecar's Sarah Bennett-Baggs enjoys a strong finish to her race season - PR below:

Great finale finish for Sarah in the GT Cup Championship finals at Silverstone

Silverstone hosted the final rounds of the GT Cup Championship last weekend, where Sarah was campaigning her Adrian Flux sponsored M3 E46 BMW in Group 3 finishing with pole position after qualifying, two podium finishes, a class win, top 10 finish and fastest lap in race 1. Saturday's late qualifying proved to be extremely tricky, the circuit looked perfectly dry but was slightly damp and with the low temperature there was no chance of getting heat into the slick tyres and grip was non-existent. Sarah amongst others did a 360 degree spin on the out lap. After banking 3 laps Sarah gave up trying to get heat into the tyres and came in for wets. Once back out she got just one flying lap before the wets started overheating and the times went up, but it was enough to put her on pole 1st in class by almost 2 seconds and put her 15th on the grid out of 26 starters. By the end of the session the circuit was ready for slicks but everyone ran out of time to swap back.

With the whole grid all mixed up, Sarah found herself starting Sundays 1st race on row 8 surrounded by Class 1 cars, a daunting prospect!  The excitement started even before the rolling start got underway as two cars spun at Luffield as the pack were thundering through for their rolling start. Sarah got through the gap and managed to avoid the next series of events as the front running cars had a coming together just before Copse causing oil or coolant to be dropped onto the corner. This had the knock on effect for the following pack making going through Copse pretty hairy. Inevitably more accidents then happened as cars spun on the coolant and got collected by pursing competitors more coolant/ oil dropped and so on until finally out came the safety car to sort it all out. Sarah managed to keep out of trouble through the slippery section and avoid all the spinning cars coming out in 9th position overall at one point. Once the safety car went back in Sarah had a trouble free run following the faster class 1 front runners, pulling 15 seconds over her fellow class competitors and bagged fastest lap in class of  1.02.1 finishing 10th overall from 26 starters, picking up an amazing 5 places on faster class cars.

For the 2nd race Sarah started on row 11, based on her 2nd fastest qualifying lap, just behind class leader Tom Andrew in the KTM XBow, as the race started it was soon clear there had been another Copse corner incident with cars going off in all directions and for the first few laps Sarah and Tom were swapping places each lap, no sooner had the race started it was red flagged due to a major coming together between the Porsche of Alex Martin and Ferrari of David Back leaving the circuit completely blocked. The grid was reformed as per the race order on the previous lap and after the restart the rest of the race was a fury of yet more spins, and accident avoidance. Tom Andrew managed to pop ahead of Sarah in the opening laps of the restart and Sarah was held back by the Porsche 996 of Robert Koenig and ended settling for 3rd in class.

"Its been a great finale for the 2010 season, to get two podium finishes, the car has been fantastic and we really shone this weekend, maybe the 24hrs of running in the wet helped! Thankfully we avoided all the accidents today and Butler Motorsport have done a great job all year, special thanks to for Adrian Flux for sponsoring me through the season."  Sarah

BackgroundAdrian Flux specialise in insuring classic, vintage cars, right through to heavily modified sports cars. They use their specialist knowledge to offer great rates covering almost every vehicle imaginable and have a friendly flexible approach with exceptionally good rates for Women drivers across the board.