TEAM boss Christian Dick declared himself happy after Speedworks’ latest British GT Championship challenger made its debut at the weekend.

The Northwich team made history at home circuit Oulton Park as they sent out a Corvette Z06R for the first time in the sports car series’ history.

Drivers Piers and Ron Johnson piloted the machine to 11th in race one.

“We’re very pleased with the progress that we’ve made,” said Dick afterwards.

“Our expectations were low as we wanted to spend time learning about the car as the guys have not had as much time to test it as they would have liked.

“They need to discover how to get optimum performance out of the machine and Oulton [Park] isn’t a place to push.”

Ron Johnson, starting from the fifth row of the grid, climbed as high as sixth spot out on track after the pit stop window opened.

He switched places with namesake Piers after 16 laps, the latter rejoining the field in 14th position before making the most of rivals’ retirements to make up three places by the finish.

In a race two, a damper failure forced Ron [Johnson] into a gravel trap to leave the team three laps adrift in 19th place at the close.

Dick added: “It wasn’t too bad at all.

“The second race didn’t quite go as we wanted it too as we had a damper go down that pitched Ron into the gravel. We don’t fully understand why yet.

“Every time the guys have spent time in the car they’ve gone a little bit quicker and we’ve found out lots of little bits of useful information about things like fuel mileage and tyre wear.”

Northwich neighbours Chevron Racing Cars, sole entrants in the GTC class with a GR8 driven by former British Touring Car Championship regular Anthony Reid and Nantwich-based youngster Jordan Witt, enjoyed a trouble-free run in race one to finish in 12th place overall.

The pair repeated the result later on after spending a long spell inside the top ten.

Further up the field, defending champions Trackspeed and series newcomers Scuderia Vittoria clinched a win apiece.

David Ashburn and Richard Westbrook claimed honours in the opening race of the season despite the best efforts of United Autosports duo Mike Guasch and Matt Bell in their Audi R8 LMS.

The top two were split by less than two seconds at the finish line.

Charles Batemen and Michael Lyons had a more comfortable margin of victory in race two as they beat the Preci-Spark Mercedes AMG SLS of twins David and Godfrey Jones to the flag by more than 20 seconds.

Their Ferrari 458 Italia had started from the back of the grid following a post-qualifying penalty.

Jonathan Adam guided Beechdean Motorsport’s Aston Martin DBRS9 to third position in the campaign curtain-raiser, while Guasch and Bell claimed a second top-three finish of the weekend in race two.

The series heads n ext to Norfolk circuit Snetterton on May 15.