On Friday, January 20th 2017, Round Four of the RaceDepartment MINI Challenge Season 10 was held in Silverstone. Here is our race report.

After finishing outside the points in the previous race in Brands Hatch, STAX Racing driver Jazz Forsberg aimed to score some much-needed points in this race. However, a change of pedals meant that he would be compromised for this race while benefitting from this change in the long run.

Jazz qualified in P18 and was able to gain a spot right after the start. Exiting Village corner, he had to avoid a spinning car and gained even more places, finding himself in P14. After the start and the initial chaos, the field settled down a bit. Nonetheless, there were some great battles for positions up and down the grid. Jazz was in a group of roughly nine cars, each bumper to bumper for several laps, and great racing ensued.  On Lap 3, Jazz was able to squeeze by Rob Milliken into The Loop and was in P11 momentarily. Jazz lost two places in the next two laps but was able to match the speed of the cars around him.

On Lap 6, Jazz went wide coming into the Brooklands corner and lost some places, rejoining the track in 16th position. However, he gained another place in the following lap. Jazz had another off at the same corner on Lap 8, but this time he didn’t loose a place.

For the next six laps, he was able to follow Rob Milliken and was just one place outside of a points scoring position. So a finish in the points was still achievable. Unfortunately, on Lap 15, he encountered a 3 or 4 second long computer freeze just as he was coming out of Farm Curve. As a result, his car was sent spiraling towards the barrier and crashed hard into it. Jazz wrestled the car around the track, but missed the pit entry due to the car being nearly undrivable and decided to retire from the race shortly after that.

The penultimate round of the season will be held on Friday, February 3rd 2017. For this race, the series will revisit Brands Hatch, racing on the Grand Prix layout this time.

On the next page, you can find a gallery of screenshots, the broadcast and Jazz’ onboard video of the race. On page 3, you can find the complete race results of the race.