AFTER a reasonable weekend at Spa in the British GT Championship, Ian Loggie returned to his home circuit of Oulton Park for the latest round of GT Cup on Saturday.
With a healthy head in the GTO Class, Ian and co-driver Richard Neary were hoping to tighten their grip at the top of the table with a huge points haul over the two planned 40-minutes races.
With numbers in the field well down due to some internal issues in the series, only 11 were out across the different classes, but this didn't stop the No6 Abba Racing AMG GT3 Mercedes taking pole position.
This was a more satisfying result as the team had stayed up until 2am changing the engine after a fault was found during Friday's testing.
Before the race had started Ian and Richard had been hit with a 16-second success penalty which they had to serve at the mandatory pit stop/driver change.
In the first race, Richard was out first and as the lights went green on the rolling start, he rocketed away from the field and soon put two seconds on the following Tim Gray Motorsport Radical RXC of Steve Burgess who on lap two made contact with something or someone and was out of the race, which left the Mercedes as the only GTO car.
The second and third place cars were now the two Top Cat Racing Lamborghinis and as the No6 car was much quicker the gap hugely increased as the race went on.
By the time the pit stops arrived the lead was more than 30 seconds and then it was over to Ian who simply was too fast and streaked away to take a very dominant win.
Race two would see the same field and this time Ian started but the Radical was fixed and raring to go.
As the lights went out, Ian kept the lead and pulled a gap, but the Radical was not going away.
As the laps went by the gap was static at around four seconds but it wasn't comfortable.
When the pit stops arrived, in jumped Richard and tried to keep the gap, but with about five minutes to go the Radical was right on the tail of the Mercedes and soon got past and Richard just couldn't find a way back and had to settle for second.
It was still not a bad result, but a double win would have topped off a difficult weekend for the team.
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