Olli Caldwell completes plenty of mileage in the British F4 Championship Media Day at Donington Park using the National layout.
The Championship will visit the circuit for the second weekend of the 2017 season which Olli will unfortunately not be at as he will be joining the series at Croft, four weekends in.
For many this test was quite an important build up for that weekend, however for Olli he was there to put laps in, gain more experience for perhaps future racing at Donington and complete all media duties.
Those media duties included all official championship photos for the British F4 website and press, filming was done for ITV4’s coverage of series and along with all of that local press and radio stations came in to meet the drivers and conduct some interviews. As always Olli did a great job in his interviews and got everything else done early whilst the track was wet.
Morning session
With rain overnight the track was very damp to start with, Olli did go out for a few laps but the team then decided this was the best time to get the press duties completed. Eventually the sun came out about 90 minutes into the three-hour session and the track quickly dried up. With the times tumbling Olli went back out with just over an hour to go in the session. Over the session Olli dropped five seconds in time and was now in the top ten as he came in for another quick stop before one more run.
With twelve minutes to go Olli set off for his final run and went green every lap setting a 1:10:451 on lap seven, but just as Olli was going quick the red flags came out which saw an immediate end to the session. It left Olli 11th place, but had he been able to carry on for the extra five minutes left there’s no doubt he would have been further up.
Afternoon session
The afternoon session saw a rise in temperature and it was where most drivers decided to put in some new tyre runs. This included Olli who
did a total of four stints, most of which were disrupted by red flags. In times of timing Olli seemed to be going quick at the worst times as every time he would be on a good run the red flags would come out so he was never quite able to get the times he was capable of.
In the end Olli finished the session in 11th place with a quickest time of 1:09:012, a one tenth gain would have left him 9th place!
At the end of testing Olli commented: “It’s not been the best day for me, we were definitely unfortunate with red flags coming at the wrong times but there’s nothing I can do about that. In the wet we had pace which was good and I definitely gained some valuable experience. In the afternoon, it was a story of being hampered by red flags but I got 100 laps in over the day which is positive.”
The next official British F4 test is on Wednesday 8th March at Brands Hatch Indy.