Adderbury's Kell makes solid start to GT World Challenge Europe season in France

The 28-year-old official McLaren GT3 Junior Driver along with French co-drivers Arthur Rougier and Simon Gachet finished just 27secs behind the Gold Cup winner in their CSA Racing entered McLaren 720S EVO after six-hours of hard racing around Paul Ricard in Southern France.

The Endurance Cup race was run mainly in darkness, finishing at midnight, and saw their number 111 McLaren start from the fourth row of the grid in the multi-class race featuring a near 60-car field with qualifying times incredibly close.

Kell, who claimed class victory at the corresponding event last April, completed two, one-hour stints behind the wheel, the #111 McLaren in contention for a class podium throughout, completing 176-laps around the fast, sweeping 3.6-mile track, taking the chequered flag in eighth overall despite a handling imbalance.

Kell will continue his GT World Challenge Europe season on 'home' soil, contesting two, one-hour Sprint races at Brands Hatch on May 3.

“I’m happy with the result, maximising the ‘package’ we had in the race and staying inside the overall top-10 throughout and top-three of the Gold Cup class.

“The balance of our McLaren was badly affected by ‘pick-up’ on the tyres, rubber ‘marbles’ collected when having to overtake cars off the racing line making our car very demanding and tricky to drive as the race went on.

“The CSA team did a great job with perfect strategy calls and good, fast pit-stops for our scheduled driver changes while Arthur, Simon and I drove clean races without incurring any penalties in a quality and talented field comprising of former and a current Formula One driver. 

“We’ll analyse data and see where improvements can be made for future endurance races on the GT World Challenge Europe calendar but we now focus on the two, one-hour ‘sprint’ races at Brands Hatch.

“Brands is a very different kind of track to fast, sweeping Paul Ricard circuit. The timetable is compressed so we need to be on the pace immediately and have strong qualifying results as it’s a difficult track to overtake on in a GT3 car.”