Midway through an increasingly impressive debut season in motor racing, all-new British F3 outfit Ultimate Motorsport registered the highest finish in its brief history last time out at Brands Hatch, courtesy of Michael Devaney’s superb fourth place. Here the Irishman reflects on that weekend, and explains why the next step up has to be onto the podium…
The result at Brands Hatch gave everyone a good boost, which after the run of European races we had just come back from was great to help keep everyone motivated. From our position in the opening round at
Oulton Park back in April – where we finished but didn’t even get any points – to where we are now, consistently well up inside the top ten, shows we are making progress all the time.
We expected and wanted to get into the top ten at Brands for sure. We just made it in qualifying – which was the best of the season for us – and we knew we had a better race pace, which we went on to prove. I was a little bit surprised given where we had been in previous meetings, but equally we knew we had some improvements for Brands.
We were racing against the front-runners throughout the weekend, and it had been a while since we had done that. Bucharest was the last time we had truly been in the mix with the top guys. It was pleasing to be up there at a more standard circuit like Brands, and from a personal point-of-view it’s just nice to be back racing again and up at the front.
In the first race I got a good start. Esteban (Guerrieri – team-mate) was two places ahead of me on the grid, but I got past him into the first corner and then we were side-by-side down the back straight. He got back past me, but then I ended up getting ahead of him again. It was a shame he later had his clutch problems, because I really think we were on for another double points finish there like we had accomplished at Monza last month.
