Colin Queen Bags Strong Points On GB3 Championship Debut

USA racing star Colin Queen made a promising start to his GB3 Championship season, bagging a brace of top 10 finishes over the Easter Weekend at Oulton Park.

The Floridian marked his debut in Britain’s premier single-seater championship in highly encouraging fashion, battling mixed conditions to come home with a strong haul of points for the Fortec Motorsport rookie.

Backed by ONE Sotheby's International Realty on the #62 Fortec car, 19-year-old Queen put himself and the Tatuus GB3 machine through their paces with a comprehensive testing schedule prior to the visit to Cheshire’s 2.69-mile circuit, and placed himself fifth at one stage in pre-event running leading into the weekend.

It all built up to Saturday morning’s crucial Qualifying session, in which Queen had 20 minutes to put himself as high up the grid for the weekend’s three races as possible. The American ran strongly in the top 12 for much of the session, but a better final run jumped him up into a solid 10th place in a competitive field, only 0.7s from the pole time.

With sunny skies later that afternoon and Oulton Park being a tight and tricky place to overtake around, Queen knew he had to make a good start from row five. He did just that, and in one brave move around the outside at Old Hall corner he swept by two rivals and into eighth place, where he stayed comfortably until the chequered flag to bag important points on his debut.

His second best effort in Qualifying meant he would start race two from 11th on Monday morning, but the weather had taken a turn as rain made for two wet affairs. The multiple Formula Ford race winner made up an early place with another rapid start, but would be eliminated unfortunately on a messy restart procedure after a safety car. His front wing removed, the Fortec man looked instead to race three.

Race three would feature a new system to decide the grid which would be partially reversed from Qualifying results, switching the top 12 rather than the whole grid. That meant Queen started sixth after a three-place grid drop for the last race, with a shot of silverware still in his sights.

Weather by this stage had not improved, and Queen found himself battling to make up ground in the spray ahead of him. Settling into 10th place after a squeeze on the exit of Old Hall, Queen then climbed one spot better off to finish a very respectable ninth, adding more points to his initial haul in Cheshire.

Colin Queen: “For our debut in the series, I think we can say that it was a good start for us. We qualified in the top half and raced even higher on Saturday, so we’ve got a lot of positives to take away from the first weekend of the season.

“It’s hard to pass around this track and even worse when you can’t see what’s happening ahead of you in the spray like we had on Monday, but overall we’ve learned a lot about the car and we’ll put it into practice at Silverstone. It will be awesome racing at that track, and hopefully with our testing we’ve done there already it can be a great weekend.”

The American will next be in action at the famous Silverstone Grand Prix circuit, as the GB3 Championship’s next three races take place over 27/28 April.