Hines bullish after win

Luke Hines warned his rivals there was more to come after he and team-mate Jeremy Metcalfe picked up their first win of the season in the Avon Tyres British GT Championship at Knockhill.

Metcalfe led the 22-car field off the grid and looked to be pulling well clear only for the pace of his Ferrari 430 GT3 to be curtailed by three safety-car periods.

The third of those stoppages, however, caused Metcalfe to momentarily drop back, leaving Hines 30 seconds off the lead at the pitlane changeover.

However, Hines quickly moved ahead of the field and, despite the race's fourth safety-car period, maintained his lead to the finish for a six-second win in the hour-long race over Viper duo James Gornall and Jon Barnes. The other Viper pairing of Craig Wilkins and Aaron Scott were third.

After his victory, Hines said: "I just kept out of trouble and let everyone else get caught up in the mess. But it's great to win, it's a fantastic team here and we're only going to get stronger."

Team-mate Metcalfe added: "I didn't quite get the lead I wanted but Luke did a great job. He was fantastic all weekend and it was great for us to get out first over and done with."

Hunter Abbott and Rob Austin sealed the GT4 class win by more than a lap over Matt Nicoll-Jones and Stewart Linn. However, the pair failed to finish the weekend's other race so Nicoll-Jones and Linn took the class win to extend their championship lead.

The overall win on that occasion went to Godfrey and David Jones, who took their first British GT victory for three years after a captivating battle with Hector Lester and Allan Simonsen.

Lester looked on course for victory in the Ferrari 430 until a marginal error with just five laps of the race left. He found himself slightly out of position and David Jones managed to dive past him for a lead he maintained to the chequered flag.

Jones said afterwards: "I thought my chance had gone because, after the safety car, I only had about ten minutes left to do anything about it and I was back in fifth. But thankfully two cars bounced themselves out and I only had the Ferrari and Aston Martin to beat. Thankfully, Hector made a slight mistake and I sneaked past and that was that."

Lester ended up in second, 1.243 seconds behind the racer winner while the Aston Martin DBRS9 of Adrian Willmot and Michael Bentwood ended up in third spot.

Fellow racer winner Godfrey Jones described the hour-long race at Knockhill as "great run". He added: "It was all pretty close and every was bunched up pretty well so I wasn't sure quite how it'd go. I got past a few cars and managed to get us up to fourth from seventh on the grid so that was great."

The pair's race win was just reward after a dire 2007 season in which the pair struggled to get to grips with the harder compound tyres on their Ascari KZ1R.

The next round of the championship takes place at Rockingham on 25 May.

Click here for race reports from Oulton Park