McGuire ‘quietly confident’ after Days of Thunder experience

Max McGuire is embarking upon the remainder of his maiden Playstation Ginetta Junior Championship campaign in confident spirits, after edging ever-closer to the top ten in his latest two outings and keeping his 100 per cent finishing record firmly intact.

The Altrincham ace – a former front-runner in the BRDC Stars of Tomorrow karting championship, the same series which first set a certain Lewis Hamilton on the fast track to future Formula 1 glory – headed to the prestigious 50th anniversary meeting of the Ginetta Festival at Cadwell Park aiming to build upon a solid start to his fledgling sportscar career at Brands Hatch a week earlier. The spectacular, 17-corner, uphill, down-dale mini-Nürburgring-style Lincolnshire track was quite a change from Brands Hatch’s Indy circuit, Max admitted.

“Coming from Brands where there are only four or five corners – and where apart from the first corner it’s all pretty flat – this was much harder,” he acknowledged. “There were a lot more gear changes involved, and 90 per cent of the corners are blind and go either up or downhill very steeply. I heard all the drivers coming in after practice saying ‘it’s going to be absolutely mental out there tomorrow!’”

The 14-year-old – the youngest driver in the championship – admitted to never getting it together in qualifying, consequently lining up a lowly 18th on the starting grid for race one and 16th for race two. With Stars’ series director Carolynn Hoy there to cheer him on, however, he stressed he was determined to make amends come race day.

“That left me really fired-up for the races,” Max underlined. “I made a really good start in the first one and overtook about four or five cars into the first corner. After that I made up a place every three laps or so and finished 12th, which was my best result so far.

“I was really pleased, because at Brands Hatch I was just being really careful to make sure I got the first two races under my belt – this time I was actually letting myself race, not backing out of moves and really going for it. I had improved again since qualifying, and had got some real racing under my belt too.”

“In the second race it was dry to start with, then it rained and then it started snowing, which made things rather tricky,” he added with more than a touch of understatement. “I was a bit more cautious because of that – there’s not much run-off at Cadwell, just walls…”

In treacherous conditions and with drivers going off all over the place, Max again kept it all together with a supremely mature performance that belied his tender years. Having crossed the line just over half a second away from a spot inside the top ten in race one, the Tockwith Motorsport star added a 13th-placed finish to his CV in race two.

Just a week later again, the Ginetta brigade returned to the British Touring Car Championship support bill at Rockingham, what Max described as a very different experience again. The Altrincham Grammar School for Boys pupil confessed to only knowing where the Northamptonshire circuit went from watching last year’s touring car DVD ahead of the race weekend, but he soon got to grips with it.

“That was the best track I’ve ever been to!” he enthused. “The first corner is like ‘Days of Thunder’ – it’s like watching the movie but it’s really happening! You’re going 105mph down the main straight, just a few inches away from a concrete wall on the outside of you. It’s pretty balls-out… Then you come into a really tight hairpin from the long, sweeping oval – braking for that is hard, really juddery.”

After qualifying 14th out of the 21 competitors – “I was in the top ten, about eighth or ninth, for 14 of the 15 minutes, then on the last lap the track became really fast and I got blocked” – Max went on to reproduce his lightning start form from Cadwell to notch up his finest results in the series to-date.

“The starts are really good fun,” he said with a grin, “though you do get motion sickness from all the weaving around to get heat into the tyres on the green flag lap! You see all the spectators around the circuit too and think ‘blimey!’”

“It’s still all quite an experience for me – I’m still getting used to being stopped on the way to the toilets to sign autographs!” he joked, before adding somewhat matter-of-factly, “but after that you just get down to it.

“I made a pretty good start in race one, and was up into ninth by the second corner. I then tried to go down the inside of two other cars at once, but it didn’t really work. I was on the inside, and the driver on the outside got turned around by the one in the middle. They both came across and smashed into the side of me too with a massive bang.

“It was quite a large impact into the side of the car, but thankfully it wasn’t on the driver’s side. That bent the steering a bit, and the rivets that held the inside of the door in popped out which meant they were clattering about inside the cockpit for the rest of the race, so I was pleased to get back up to 11th in the end.

“In the second race I made an amazing start – everyone went to the inside and braked quite hard for the first corner, so I went around the outside, stayed flat-out and got up to sixth. Then I was squeezed out onto the marbles, though, and lost all the places I had gained.”

Nevertheless, 12th position at the chequered flag from 19 finishers, and having dropped back as far as 16th following his early misfortune, was an impressive result, and one helped in no small part by the dedication and commitment of his mechanic, Sean Haddlesey, who performed a fantastic job to repair the teenager’s car on the Saturday night from the hefty damage it had sustained in race one.

With the next round at Donington Park at the beginning of May, Max is making remarkable progress up against rivals who are for the major part not only several years older than him, but also in their second or even third year in the championship. Despite still lacking in seat time, he succeeded in slashing the gap that separates him from the front-runners from eight to just 2.5 seconds by the end of the Rockingham weekend and now sits a mere three points adrift of 12th spot in the 23-strong drivers’ standings.

He may be facing a disadvantage at both Donington and Thruxton a fortnight later as there is unusually no one-hour Friday practice session at either circuit, compounding the difficulty that under-16s are unable to test away from race weekends. That means Max will head into qualifying with a scant 15 minutes’ track time under his belt – not that he is letting it worry him, though.

“I was pleased about the fact that I had been able to do some proper racing again,” he reflected on his third tin-top meeting. “I did feel pretty hacked off about what had gone on at the starts, but it’s racing and these things happen – it doesn’t always go your way, and when things go wrong you’ve just got to accept it.

“I’ve never been to Donington before, but I know roughly how it goes from the Playstation! It will be another new experience for me and I’ll just have to learn the track again. I’ll definitely be going for the top ten – that’s my next aim – then the top five, and then the podium. I’m feeling quietly confident.”

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