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Dubai success for Aldworth speedster





Twenty-one-year-old Tom Fletcher, who is on industrial placement for the third of his four-year degree at Oxford Brookes, was one of two student engineers on the team racing the Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3, a 550bhp supercar on the wishlist of Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson.
From a starting grid of 95, the RJN car took fifth place overall and second in the top Am A6 category, up against Ferraris, Mercedes and Porsches.
The win was all the more remarkable given the rookie all-gamer line-up of drivers of four international 2014 GT Academy winners from the competition created by Nissan and PlayStation.
The drivers, fresh from three months intensive training on the cutting edge driver development programme, were joined by 2013 GT Academy Germany winner Florian Strauss – the team’s ‘professional’ with a full 18-months of racing experience.
Mr Fletcher said “Dubai was amazing. From day one everything went so smoothly – unloading the car from the shipping container, the set up, practise and qualification – it all ran to plan.
“The team was so professional, we knew we were serious competition.
“With temperatures dropping from 30 degrees in the daytime down to around 10 at night, for me, the biggest challenge was to adapt tyre pressures to maximise those changing conditions.
“24 hour races are usually gruelling – you run on adrenalin but apart from a scheduled night time pitstop when we had to deal with some contact damage, and a couple of drive-through penalties, the car was faultless and the race just seemed to slip by.
“The strategy to keep the drivers strictly to set times worked perfectly.”
Team principal of the Nissan GT Academy team RJN, Bob Neville, said: “This was a great result.
“We had a few silly penalties and and were unlucky in timings of a few driver changes, but other than that, it was a near faultless performance by our team and our drivers.
“Second in this class is a very impressive result and immensely satisfying.”
Nissan Nismo Motorsport global director Darren Cox said it was testament to the professionalism of the team, the reliability and speed of the car and thorough preparation of the drivers that the team came through relatively unscathed and with a highly impressive result.
“It speaks volumes that the team brought out three tonnes of spare parts and took the same three tonnes back home again,” he said.
Mr Fletcher will work for RJN, competing in sprint and endurance races until he returns to university in September. He hopes to join a race team after completing his degree in 2016.
Highlights and time laps from the race can be viewed on www.youtube.com/user/
nismotv2013.



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