Halfway through 🥅

We're now halfway through the Innovation Racing GT4 Development Programme with Ginetta, and it feels like the right moment to take stock of where we are.

Ten development days across ten months, and at the end of 2026 one driver walks away with a fully funded season for 2027. Every single development day counts.

Six of those days are now behind us, across Blyton Park, Donington Park and Brands Hatch, alongside the simulator and media work that runs in parallel with all of it. Here's how it's gone.

What the programme actually is

It would be easy to assume ten days in a GT4 car is just ten days of lap time. It isn't, and that's the entire point of it.

Throughout the year we've been focusing on the aspects of racing performance that matter enormously in endurance racing and get almost no dedicated practice time anywhere else:

• Driver changes — the choreography of getting out, getting the next driver in, belted and away
• Radio communication — being clear, brief and useful under load
• Traffic management — the single biggest lap-time variable in multi-class racing
• Tyre preparation — getting the tyre into the window on the lap it needs to be there
• Setup feedback — describing a car accurately enough that an engineer can act on it
• Consistency-based running — long runs where the target is repeatability, not a single lap

Alongside that, we cover media training, sponsorship acquisition and social media. Those sessions have been some of the most valuable of the whole programme, and they're the ones I expect to still be paying off years from now.

Creating an environment where drivers can genuinely work on these skills is actually quite uncommon. Testing opportunities are limited, and most professional race teams need to spend the running they have on making the car faster. That's completely understandable. But it leaves newer drivers learning some of the most important skills in the job in the most stressful environments possible, live, with a result on the line. Getting to practise them deliberately, with no result attached, is a genuine privilege.

The days so far

Day one got the year underway, and set the tone immediately. On-track running, but assessed across every area rather than just pace, and of course the simulator work and the media presentations, which turned out to be one of the most valuable parts of the day. The Ginetta itself is mega to drive. I also started experimenting with new onboard capture methods around this point, including an F1 visor-cam style angle, which has become a bit of a running project since. Our first three days were at Blyton Park, Ginetta's own testing facility, before graduating to some bigger circuits.

Donington Park picked things up from there. The first day there (national layout) was about covering as many different racing scenarios as we could in the time available, including driver changes and setup communication.

We went back to Donington, this time on the GP layout, for a day built entirely around traffic. With GT3s and LMPs out on track at the same time, you learn very quickly that you can be extremely quick in practice and still lose enormous amounts of time with other cars around you. It's very easy to throw away seconds of lap time purely through your decision-making, where you commit, where you yield, how early you read what the car ahead is about to do. I was generally pleased with my performance across the day, but there's plenty there to take forward.

That day was also the halfway marker of the programme, which made it a natural point to step back and look at how much the approach had changed since day one.

Brands Hatch was the most recent one, and the one I've been most pleased with.

Brands, and a change of approach

I started the Brands day with clear personal performance targets, and kept them as my primary focus throughout every session, deliberately away from the lap time. The approach paid off, and I was very happy with where we ended up.

That's a shift in how I've been working, and I think it's the most significant thing to come out of the first half of the programme. Chasing the number on the dash is the obvious way to spend a test day, and it's usually the least productive. Chasing a specific process target, and letting the lap time be a consequence rather than a goal, has produced better days and better feedback almost every time I've committed to it properly.

The Indy layout helps too. It's short but very technical, and it gives you a huge number of attempts at each corner, which makes it a brilliant place to work on something specific and actually see whether the change stuck. The car was running brilliantly, so we got loads of laps in across a real variety of conditions.

Where we are, and what's left

Six days down, four to go, and my feeling in the car is getting stronger and stronger. Every lap turned is one step closer to the ultimate goal.

There's no room to coast in the second half of this. The gap between the drivers over ten days is decided by the details, and the areas I'm most focused on now are the ones that don't show up on a single lap, consistency across a stint, quality of feedback, and decision-making in traffic.

Thank you

Huge thanks to Simon, Hadley and Luke for putting this programme together, and to Alex, Sean and every one of the mechanics who make each day run.

Massive thank you to the partners making all of this possible and guiding me forwards.

And to everyone reading this, every like, every comment, every share has genuinely helped put me here. I'm building this from zero, and none of it happens without that support. Thank you. 🤝

See you at Le Mans. 🌍