Barwell Motorsport's Snetterton Sweep Puts the Huracán GT3 on Course for British GT Glory
Three wins from six races gave a privateer Lamborghini team a commanding championship lead in 2017.
Jon Minshaw and Phil Keen, the 2016 vice-champions, took victory in Race 1 of the Snetterton 300 on May 28th to claim their third win of the 2017 campaign.
Customer credibility against factory-backed rivals
Beating factory-supported Bentley and Aston Martin programs with a customer-run Lamborghini carried real credibility, the kind that no press event or spec sheet can replicate.
The naturally aspirated V10 advantage
The Huracán GT3's naturally aspirated V10 offered linear power delivery and predictable throttle response, making it forgiving for the amateur-professional driver pairings that define British GT's Pro-Am format.
A championship-winning partnership with Lamborghini
Barwell Motorsport, the Norfolk-based team, built a sustained relationship with Lamborghini's customer racing program, campaigning Huracán GT3s in British GT from 2016 onward and accumulating multiple championship results across several seasons.
A decade-long platform evolving from road car to race car
The Huracán GT3 evolved through Evo and Evo2 variants over a full decade, and its successor, the Temerario GT3, marks the first race car entirely designed and developed in-house at Lamborghini's Sant'Agata Bolognese facility.
Pole position and a Barwell 1-2 lockout
Minshaw and Keen qualified on pole ahead of Aston Martin and Bentley entries, then converted that pace into a Race 1 win as Barwell's sister car, driven by Liam Griffin and Sam Tordoff, completed a 1-2 lockout.
A live reliability and performance audit
Barwell's wins at Oulton Park and Snetterton against Aston Martins, Bentleys, and the rest of the British GT field functioned as a live, public reliability and performance audit of the Huracán GT3 platform.
The Pro-Am formula refined
Jon Minshaw, fast and experienced but not a professional, benefited enormously from an engine that delivered its power in a smooth, progressive curve rather than arriving in a sudden turbo-assisted rush.
Hundreds of race laps feeding the customer ecosystem
Barwell's operational knowledge of the Huracán GT3, accumulated across hundreds of race laps and multiple championship campaigns, fed back into the broader ecosystem of teams running the car worldwide.
From atmospheric V10 to turbo: a new era begins
The Temerario GT3 swaps the naturally aspirated V10 for a twin-turbocharged engine, and teams that built their programs around the Huracán's predictable power delivery will need to adapt to an entirely different powertrain philosophy.