Bryant and Smith back to Winning Ways at Dijon in 2.0L Cup

Olly Bryant and Andrew Smith were back on winning form at the Dijon-Prenois circuit in France on the 9th June.

After a disappointing weekend at Spa 3 weeks earlier, which saw the no.64 Historika run Porsche 901 have it’s first DNF in 5 seasons of racing. Olly went fastest in the 2.0L Cup practice session on Friday and then backed this up with a dominant pole position on Saturday, qualifying 0.9seconds faster than the no.99 sister car of Andrew Kirkaldy and the no.77 machine of Andrew Jordan and Mark Sumpter.

Andrew Smith took the race start from pole position and was immediately challenged into turn 1 by Kirkaldy who managed to emerge ahead running into turn 2. For the next 45 minutes a titanic battle ensued, with positions changing regularly as they frequently ran side by side along the main straight and through the sequence of turns 2,3,4 & 5. Just before the pit stops, Smith cleverly made use of traffic to emerge ahead and pitted to hand over to Olly with Kikaldy on his bumper.

Kikaldy cunningly left his pit stop early to gain track position and crept down the pitlane in front of Olly. Having watched the battle for the first half of the race, Olly wanted to make short work of passing Kirkaldy so he could build a margin to the flying Andrew Jordan behind in the 77 Sumpter machine. Olly got a run coming out of the final turn at the end of his first flier and managed to squeeze by on the run past the pits. Now in clean air, Olly pushed to build a gap of 15 seconds which he held until the flag. Kirkaldy finished P2 and main championship rival Mark Sumpter, sharing with Andrew Jordan ended up 3rd.

Historika ran 4 cars at this event which all finished the race, so it was a fantastic effort by the team who had plenty of work to do after Spa.

The next race is at the Hungaroring in Budapest on the 13-14th July.

Olly also ran the 1995 Ford Mustang GT-S1 at Dijon in the Endurance Racing Legends demonstration sessions as a shakedown for the Goodwood Festival of Speed on the 4-7th July where the car will be running in the competition section.