Team GBR’s plan to attack the new A1GP season with just one driver may be scuppered by scheduling and availability problems, team principal Katie Clements has suggested.
The Brits have finished third in every season of the World Cup of Motorsport so far, sharing driving duties mainly between Oliver Jarvis and Robbie Kerr. The team hoped that using just one driver in the new season would help them advance further up the podium.
Plans to have a driver chosen by August were disrupted by the delay in manufacture and delivery of the new Ferrari-powered cars that also forced the cancellation of the season’s first race.
Team GBR has only just received its car and has not yet had the chance to test or assess it – let alone pick a driver for it.
In a Q&A with Sky Sports, Clements said: “Basically we’ve had a lot of interest from a number of drivers over the course of the summer, so it has been a fairly tough decision. But we’re going to test a couple of drivers and move forward with one or two.”
She said the plan of just choosing a single driver now looked unlikely to be practical: “That’s the ideal situation but some drivers have different commitments and may not be able to make a race, for instance. Ideally, we’re going to have one main driver for the majority of the season. That’s the plan, but either end of the season we might have a different driver.
“It depends on various schedules – but I know who these guys are and I can say we are definitely in with a chance of winning the title with these drivers. We’ve got a good couple of drivers lined up.”
Last season Robbie Kerr and Oliver Jarvis shared racing duties, with a succession of ‘rookie’ drivers – some with considerable race experience in other series – appearing in support roles as A1GP toured the world.
These included:
- Oliver Turvey, slated to win this year’s British F3 championship and currently testing with a leading GP2 team
- James Winslow, most recently a front-runner in Australian F3
- Duncan Tappy, currently in the Tottenham Hotspur car for the Superleague Formula series
- Danny Watts, who also worked with Adam Khan to improve the performance of Team Pakistan and was part of the testing team for the new series car
Other drivers who have been associated with the team in the past include IRL racer Darren Manning, who raced in 2006, and Katherine Legge, at the back of the grid for Audi in the DTM series, who tested in 2005.