Jonathan Ridley-Holloway Gets Superb Top 7 Finish For Clio Cup
Jun 02, 2008
jakobebrey.com
North Devon saloon car racer Jonathan Ridley-Holloway concluded by far his most consistent and successful race weekend of the 2008 ELF Renault Clio Cup at Croft Circuit in North Yorkshire, 1st June, to climb to within just three points of the championship top 15.
The 23-year-old, who lives in Barnstaple, is improving with every outing in his Total Control Racing prepared Clio Cup race car and at Croft yesterday he took a superb top seven finish during the 10th round of the campaign – just missing out on sixth place by a mere three 10ths of a second at the chequered flag.
Travelling the 350 miles from his home in the South West to Croft on Friday for pre-event testing, Jonathan instantly performed well and posted the seventh fastest time in practice, pace he carried through to qualifying on Saturday.
Lining up seventh on the grid for yesterday’s 10th round of the season, Jonathan didn’t make the best start but soon made his way into the top eight and then began to catch Aron Smith and Alex Osborne ahead.
With the latter running wide at the hairpin at the end of lap eight, Smith nipped through to sixth place and Jonathan managed to snatch seventh. The Bond Oxborough Phillips, A4 Apparel and PicoPC.co.uk backed racer pressured Smith all the way to the finish and in the process pulled some 2.4 seconds clear of Osborne over the last four laps.
“I’m really happy with the performance I showed on Sunday, pace wise it wasn’t bad at all and especially considering we struggled with set-up a bit in qualifying”, commented Jonathan, “Thanks to my consistent second fastest lap though it put us on row four and that gave me the chance to run with the other front guys which was a lot of fun.
“I didn’t get a great start to the race, I dropped to eighth at the first corner and then my car was smacked on entry to Hawthorn which almost had me facing the wrong way round. I managed to catch the car though, got it all pointing in the right direction and went on to have a good race.”
During Saturday’s ninth round, Jonathan took the chequered flag in 14th position but this later became a top 12 finish when Chris Law was handed a time penalty and Gavin Pyper was excluded from the results.
