A Teenager, a Two-Point Gap, and a Championship Wide Open
Stuart Middleton is nineteen years old, racing in his first Super Trofeo Europe season, and currently sits at the top of the Pro category standings alongside Jack Bartholomew. Their Bonaldi Motorsport Huracán Super Trofeo EVO holds a two-point advantage over Imperiale Racing’s Kikko Galbiati and veteran Vito Postiglione after the opening round at Silverstone, a margin so thin that a single bad pit stop or contact incident could erase it entirely.
Middleton’s path to the lead tells the story of the opening weekend better than any points table. After Bartholomew handed over the #33 car, Middleton found himself running fifth as the race entered its closing stages. A late incident between Imperiale Racing’s own Karol Basz and Galbiati reshuffled the order, and Middleton kept clean lines through the chaos to record a win on his series debut. Basz and co-driver Bartosz Paziewski still managed to dominate Race 2, leaving them just three points behind the lead. Three crews separated by three points after two races: the Pro class already looks like a season-long knife fight, and the identical Huracán Super Trofeo EVO machinery on every grid slot guarantees that talent and strategy, not engineering budgets, will decide it.
Every Category Carries Its Own Silverstone Drama
Target Racing’s Davide Venditti and Alberto Di Folco lead Pro-Am after a perfect opening round: a double class victory and an overall podium finish, achieved from fourteenth on the grid in Race 1. Artline Team Georgia’s Shota Abkhazava and Harald Schlegelmilch took second in both races and remain the most obvious threat, though converting consistency into outright wins will define whether they can sustain a championship challenge.
In the Am class, Nicolas Gomar of AGS Events opened his 2019 campaign with two victories, holding off Raffaele Giannoni by the narrowest of margins. Lamborghini says just four seconds separated the two at the Silverstone finish, a gap that underlines how tightly matched the one-make format keeps competition across every category, not just the Pro headliner.
The Lamborghini Cup produced its own upset. Brothers Benoît and François Semoulin, competing under the Semspeed banner in their first year in the series, topped both Silverstone races ahead of three-time champion Gerhard Van der Horst. Reigning world champion Joseph Collado, meanwhile, left the UK with zero points after a disastrous double retirement. For a driver of Collado’s stature, the remaining rounds carry an urgency that few other competitors face. Across all four classes, Silverstone delivered the same message: when every car is an identical Huracán Super Trofeo EVO, the margins between triumph and disaster shrink to almost nothing.
Stars on the Rise, Veterans Under Pressure
What makes these early standings so compelling is the collision between emerging talent and established names. Bartholomew joined the Lamborghini Young Driver Programme back in 2017, a pathway that Squadra Corse uses to identify and develop future factory-caliber talent. That pipeline matters more now than ever, given Lamborghini’s expanding motorsport ambitions, and his championship-leading seat alongside teenage debutant Middleton is a live demonstration of how the Super Trofeo series functions as a proving ground.
On the other side of that dynamic, Postiglione brings years of experience to Imperiale Racing’s challenge, and Galbiati will carry home-crowd expectations when the series reaches Misano. Basz and Paziewski showed in Race 2 that they can dominate outright, but their Race 1 incident cost them dearly. The tension between youthful aggression and veteran composure runs through every category. Even in the Lamborghini Cup, the Semoulin brothers’ debut double victory over three-time champion Van der Horst mirrors the same generational storyline playing out in Pro. The equal-equipment format strips away any hiding place: reputation counts for nothing once the lights go out.
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO: Equal Machinery, Unequal Outcomes
The fundamental appeal of the Super Trofeo Europe format is that every car on the grid runs identical Huracán Super Trofeo EVO machinery. Strip away the engineering arms race that dominates open-class GT racing, and what remains is a purer test of driver skill, team strategy, and the willingness to brake a fraction later into Copse. Forum discussion around the series reflects this dynamic. Multiple enthusiasts on racing communities describe the Super Trofeo cars as aerodynamically slippery and fast enough to post lap times close to GTD-class machinery, yet the equal-equipment format means results hinge on the people, not the budget.
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO represents the naturally aspirated V10 at its competitive peak, a platform purpose-built for track use with redesigned aerodynamics and no concessions to street legality. Every car on the grid screams that 5.2-liter engine note through circuits from Silverstone to Jerez, and for enthusiasts who care about atmospheric engines, the series functions as a living showcase of a powertrain philosophy Lamborghini is actively evolving away from. The Temerario GT3 represents Lamborghini’s first competition car fully designed, developed, and built in-house, a significant departure from the partnership model that characterized earlier GT3 efforts. For teams and drivers currently building their programs around the Huracán’s characteristics, this transition will eventually mean adapting to a different powertrain architecture and weight profile. That looming shift only sharpens the stakes of every V10-powered battle happening right now.
Beyond Silverstone: What’s Next for the Championship
Misano is the next stop, bringing the series to Italian soil where Galbiati and Postiglione will aim for their first win of the season after claiming fifth and second overall at Silverstone. According to the 2019 schedule, the championship then visits Zandvoort, Spa-Francorchamps, and the Nürburgring before concluding with the European rounds and World Finals at Jerez in late October.
With three Pro crews separated by just three points, a Pro-Am leader who charged from fourteenth to the overall podium, an Am class decided by four seconds, and a Lamborghini Cup champion sitting on zero points, the Silverstone shakeout has set up a season where no category offers a comfortable margin. The identical Huracán Super Trofeo EVO cars will see to that. Every round from here will tighten the screws on drivers who showed weakness and reward those who kept their composure when the order reshuffled around them. Misano cannot come soon enough.
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