ISSUE NO. 3
Ashley Marshall scored a pair of strong top-five finishes in the Ginetta GT5 Challenge at Oulton Park last weekend as he returned to full-time motor racing for the first time in almost two years.
The 25-year-old from Bridlington had only competed once since September 2018, but proved he’d lost none of his undoubted talent as he made his debut with new team Fox Motorsport at the Cheshire track.
Fifth in Saturday morning’s qualifying session, he was only five hundredths of a second away from setting the fastest lap in Race One, but his ability to move forward from his grid spot was curtailed by an early incident that forced much of the race to be run at slow speed behind the safety car.
Bogging down at the start of Race Two and dropping to 12th, he did well to recover to eighth spot by the finish, and another bad getaway on Sunday afternoon – this time caused by excess wheelspin – pushed him back to 13th by the second corner.
The Kitchenmeister-supported racer was in a determined mood however, recovering superbly in the 15-minute race and making a series of impressive and emphatic overtaking moves as he picked his way through the pack.
In the final race, he carved his way up to fifth place by the chequered flag, just two seconds away from a podium spot. He is sixth in the Drivers’ Championship as he begins preparations for the next round – also at Oulton Park.
Ashley said: “I have mixed feelings on the weekend. My target was to finish every race of the season inside the top five and give myself the best possible chance of winning the championship, and I genuinely feel a podium was a realistic in Race One before we ran most of it behind the safety car. I hadn’t qualified well for Races Two and Three and I made bad starts both times, so I was in recovery mode, but the race pace – especially at the end of Sunday – was very strong, in spite of blistering my hand because the gears weren’t shifting cleanly. I’m content because I hadn’t driven the car since March, so naturally I’d have been a bit rusty, but I know there’s a lot more to come and that gives me a lot of confidence for the upcoming rounds.”
