Rodin’s Alex Ninovic tops British F4 testing at Silverstone

Photo: British F4

Rodin Motorsport’s Alex Ninovic was fastest in British Formula 4’s pre-event test day on Silverstone’s National layout.

There were two sessions on Thursday, and all 22 of the drivers taking part set their personal best laptimes in the latter.

Ninovic was first to the top in the first three-and-a-half hour session, setting a 1m00.473s lap. By the time the chequered flag waved, times had improved by almost six seconds.

His Rodin team-mate Jack Sherwood was the first driver to achieved a sub-minute lap, then Xcel Motorsport’ Zack Scoular hit the top of the times before Ninvoic brought the pace down into the 58s just three minutes in.

Sherwood responded with a 56.303s, and improved on his next two laps to 55.688s. James Higgins was the next Rodin driver to go fastet, and three successive personal bests brought th pace down to 55.209s.

Ninovic set a 55.120s a few minutes later, which was a time that rivals found harder to beat. Hitech GP’s points leader Deagen Fairclough scrubbed 0.006 seconds off it, then half an hour in Ninovic reclaimed top spot by a tiny 0.002s.

Argenti Motorsport’s Rowan Campbell-Pilling bettered him shortly after by 0.021s, and over the next few minutes there were several more miniscule gains. Sherwood set a 55.046s, Hitech’s Reza Seewooruthun posted a 55.013s, Higgins broke the 55s barrier with a 54.868s, and five minutes after that a 54.833s from Fairclough put him on top for almost an hour-and-a-half.

New personal bests from Ninovic and Sherwood two hours in to the day’s running brought the benchmark laptime down to 54.790s, then four-and-a-half minutes from the end Fairclough snatched back the fastest lap by 0.107s.

Sherwood was shuffled down to third at the finish, as Seewooruthun got within 0.053s of Fairclough on his last lap.

The second session also lasted three-and-a-half hours, and featured the addition of Charlie Edge in one of Chris Dittmann Racing’s cars. The karter is planning to race with the team in British F4 next year.

Fairclough was the driver to beat through the first 27 minutes of session two, starting off with a 56.266s and improving eight times to bring the pace down to 55.047s before he was finally bettered.

Seewooruthun was the driver to knock him off the top by 0.046s, but 13s later Fairclough improved again to 54.876s and return to first place. Two laps later he knocked another 0.073s off his best effort.

There was also more pace in hand for Seewooruthun, and he pipped Fairclough by 0.005s. The immediate response from the latter was the new fastest lap for the whole test: a 54.670s.

That went unbeaten for two hours, before eventually Ninovic went 0.009s faster than Fairclough. It took another 20 minutes for him to improve again, to 54.538s, but through that stint he pushed a little more and found another two small increments. He improved by 0.005s first, then by 0.004s to end the test fastest by 0.141s.

The top 21 were split by 0.688s, with Edge the only driver more than a second off the pace.

Test results