Andrew Rackstraw retains his lead in the Porsche Carrera Cup GB Pro category after a challenging damage control drive at Croft Circuit in his Rosland Gold by Century Motorsport team Porsche Carrera 911 GT3 Cup car.

The 2.1-mile North Yorkshire track has never been kind to Andrew, and once again the South African driver had to keep faith in his ability and dig deep to twice recover to post a strong points-scoring result in both Rounds 7 and 8 of the UK’s fastest single make racing series.

Having qualified fifth, Andrew made a good start from the outside of Row 3 – but lost a position after losing momentum in traffic as cars bunched up for the opening sequence of corners. The 23-year old Capetonian driver made an overtake move around the outside of Tower Bend on lap two but was hit by the other car and forced off the road. He rejoined the track in 12th place and while he regained two places on the next lap, a missing front splitter and damaged tracking saw him eventually finished the 17-lap race in 10th place overall – although more importantly, he netted sixth-place Pro series points to maintain his championship lead.

In race two, Andrew started from the inside of Row 5 and despite a congested track was one of only four drivers (out of 16) to break into the 1min 18sec lap time as he came from 10th to finish sixth.

Andrew is the only one of the top three Pro drivers to have scored points in all races this year and leads the category by one point. “Croft just wasn’t our weekend,” admits Andrew.

“For whatever reason the track has never been that kind to me, so I’m happy to get that race weekend out of the way! It could have been worse, so you always have to look on the bright side.

“We didn’t have the one lap pace that we were looking for and qualified P5, but that wasn’t too bad as you always want to be in that top five position.

“In race one, contact was made early on – unavoidable and not my fault at all. It meant that we dropped down towards the back of the field and with no front splitter and the tracking out I had to do a bit of damage control and managed to get back up to P10.

“That meant that for race two I had to start from P10 and around such a tight track like Croft it’s really hard to overtake – but we managed to get up to P6 by the end of the race.

“These weekends do happen and when they do you have to keep calm, manage the situation and maximise the points that are realistically available. It’s really easy to have a good weekend and be in the right mindset, but when you have these bad weekends it’s even more important to bounce back stronger and keep faith within yourself that you can still do it – and I think that’s exactly how we are. At Century Motorsport it’s a never give up attitude.

“I feel super strong, and all focus is on Knockhill now. I’ll be training extra hard and preparing the best I can to make sure a weekend like Croft doesn’t happen again. And the only way we can do that is by hopefully qualifying on pole and pulling away during the race!

“I’d also like to say a massive thank you to all my sponsors for making this dream a continued reality.”