2006 proved to be a fine season for Scuderia Ecosse driver Chris Niarchos, as he won the British GT Championship and also enjoyed success on the international stage.

By the end of the year, the popular Greek/Canadian driver had picked up his maiden win in the FIA GT Championship and had also stood on the podium at Le Mans after the team finished third in the GT2 class in the famous 24 Hours.

Crash.net spoke to Chris to look back over a hectic last twelve months and also to look forward to the year ahead…

Q:
For you Chris, the main focus was on British GT alongside Tim Mullen but there was also success on the international stage. All-in-all, it was a pretty good year…

Chris Niarchos:
Yeah, lets be honest, for a motor-racing season it was one where people were saying to me 'I hope you don't think that's normal' as it could be a big fall from grace. I think we had a great season, to clinch one championship, finish as runner-up in FIA and get on the podium at Le Mans is a motor racing dream. Tim did a great job all season, the team was fantastic and this year we want to focus on the international campaign. We had three years in Britain and eventually clinched the title, although for the team it was two years back-to-back, and now the international stage is where our focus lies and hopefully we can better what we achieved in 2006.

Q:
The British GT championship first up. Going into the season people commented on the lack of depth in the GT2 field but despite that lack of depth it was a tough title battle with LNT and the Panoz.

Chris Niarchos:
At the beginning of the year there were four genuine contenders, there really was. There were the two Moslers, which were both strong, there was the Panoz and there was ourselves. As the season wore on, the Eclipse Mosler pulled out for their own reasons but any championship is difficult and when you are trying to do what you are doing each weekend and have a serious competitor to fight with, and with the numbers shrinking the points changed so we could only gain one point a weekend, I would argue that it was harder in some ways as there was no room for error. If we made a mistake, we fell back eight or tens points in a weekend which was very difficult to recover from.

Mondello Park set us back ten points and it took us the rest of the season to claw them back. It was one of those seasons where we had to be aggressive and go out and try and win races but we also knew that no-one on the team could afford to make a mistake and that was very relevant to how hard we all tried.

Q:
With the half point situation that came into play when there were less than six GT2 cars running, how hard did it make it to come back from the problem at Mondello when you failed to score and LNT took a double win?

Chris Niarchos:
It was soul destroying. We had gone into that round with something like three race wins, two poles out of three so we were on a high. We had come from Le Mans where we finished third but it was a hard weekend psychologically for us. We watched the whole weekend go on without us and as a driver that is the worst thing that can happen. If you go out and get beaten on the track fair and square then you accept that the better man won, but to get beaten in pitlane is awful.