Fox Motorsport will step up to the GT3 category of the Intelligent Money British GT Championship in 2022 with a McLaren 720S GT3 to be driven by team regulars Nick Halstead and Jamie Stanley.
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The team from Maldon, Essex, unveiled their car with both drivers at the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC), Woking ahead of the start of their pre-season testing programme.
This will be Fox’s first full-season campaign in the GT3 class; the majority of the team’s time in the series having been spent in race-winning GT4 campaigns.
Nick, from Andwell near Basingstoke, has been a virtual ever-present with Fox Motorsport since making his race debut in the Ginetta GT5 Challenge in 2017 and taking the title in the Am class the following year.
He made his British GT debut last year, contesting six of the seven rounds in a McLaren 570S GT4 alongside Jamie Stanley. The pair won the Pro-Am class at Snetterton and Donington and finished on the podium six times from six rounds.
Pro co-driver Jamie, by contrast, brings a wealth of GT3 experience to the line-up, having been a podium-finisher and an outright pole-position winner in the International GT Open as well as having driven such machinery in several other series.
Since winning the GT4 title in British GT in 2010, the Milton Keynes-based pro has added six more sportscar racing titles in the UK in the Lotus Cup UK, British Endurance Series and GT Cup as well as race wins in British GT, the F3 Cup and the pan-European 24h Series.
Nick Halstead said: “I’m really pleased to continue with Fox Motorsport and Jamie – who’s been coaching me since I started preparing for my first racing season – and to be able to test ourselves against the best teams and drivers in British GT. We did a good job last year in what was my first season in the championship and only just missed the GT4 Pro-Am title at the last round by a couple of points, but now’s the right time to make the step up. I remember how good it felt when I first tested a 720S GT3 at Silverstone last summer and that was the point where I knew now was the time. We have a great team around us who are very quick at learning how to understand the workings of a new car and that’s hopefully going to put us in with a shout of some strong results this year.”
Jamie Stanley said: “It’s great to be stepping up to GT3 with Nick and Fox Motorsport, but this is just the start. The hard work begins as soon as we hit the track for our first test. Last year was our first year with a McLaren race car and a combination of fantastic work from the team and strong customer support from McLaren meant we got on top of things right away and put together a very strong challenge for the GT4 Pro-Am title. While we’re under no illusions that jumping up to the top class will be easy, I think we definitely have the potential to surprise a few people and we’ll be trying to do just that.”
Paul McNeilly, Team Principal, said: “We’re very pleased to confirm our step up to the top class of the British GT Championship, which is one of the best national series in the world – as you can see by some of the manufacturer drivers who have been parachuted in over the past couple of seasons. Naturally that’s going to make it a challenge to match them, but we have a vast amount of experience of this kind of racing within the team, have won races here and internationally and really just want to hit the ground running. Nick made an enormous amount of progress last year in not just a new car, but a style of racing that was alien to him too, and his partnership with Jamie works incredibly well. I definitely think we’ll surprise some people.”
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