Sam Randon will be back on the GT Cup Championship grid this season in a Porsche – and is teaming up with another Derbyshire driver, Richard Marsh. Both will be racing for Tony Gilham’s Team Hard, with whom Randon has been competiting for several seasons now.

Randon, now 26, came close to not having a drive this season as the impact of Covid-19 on sponsorship began to bite. Instead, his season will start with the first round of the championship at Donington Park on the weekend on April 10-11 with the prospect of welcoming guests and supporters back to the track before the summer is out.

“We had a couple of really exciting opportunities being discussed during the winter but they sadly came to nothing,” said Randon, who lost a number of his 2020 sponsors whose businesses had been directly hit by the pandemic.

“It put it all in perspective how differently it affects people,” said Randon. “Our sponsors are all friends, so it has been heartbreaking to see the impact the pandemic has had not only on their ability to sponsor us but on some of their livelihoods.”

Randon was almost resigned to spending the coming season on the sidelines and then everything turned in the space of 48 hours last week. Team Hard had signed Marsh, who has GT Cup and British Touring Car Championship on a long racing CV and he was keen to team up with Randon.

Team boss Gilham said: “We are working with Sam this year on a number of fronts to make this deal work. Sam and Richard together is a formidable pairing, so we had to make it work.”

The pair will be back in the distinctive pink and green Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car with the aim of mounting a challenge for the overall championship, which Randon narrowly missed out on last year. Driving with rookie Ben Clayden, he took the GTB class win but the overall challenge fizzled out at the end of the season against much more heavily backed teams.

“I just love this car,” said Randon. “Once we got the brakes sorted last year it was just so driveable and so rewarding. GT Cup is always a challenge and the grids look healthy this year so competition will be aggressive. Richard is an experienced GT racer, having already raced at the top national level in GT racing and the BTCC, so we should be very competitive from the off. I am really looking forward to working with him and, of course, the boys from Team HARD.”

“Coincidentally, Richard and I have been talking about a possible pairing for the last year or two and we even raced against each other in the GTB class last year, so I jumped at the chance when Richard joined Team Hard and Tony put it to me. Come the middle of the year we will be able to offer trackside hospitality again and even restart our track days with passenger laps in the pink and green Porsche.”

Marsh was keen to have another crack at GT racing. “We raced Sam once last year and he beat us so I thought if you can’t beat them, join them!” said Marsh, a 53-year-old company director from Kniveton. Tony at Team Hard knows me from when I was in the BTCC and he has always said he’d find a drive for me if I ever needed one, so I called him to see what he had available. I asked if Sam was on board and 24 hours later we’d done the deal. I guess this time the overall championship must be the goal, as Sam says. Some of the other drivers can out-budget us and can test their cars a lot more than we can and feed their cars with more tyres, so we have to work hard to beat them on race weekends but I think we can do that if we prepare well and focus. It will be great to get our guests back in the pit garages with us so they can really experience what goes on behind the scenes on a race day. We can, hopefully, give them some more trophies too.”

Randon remains on the lookout for new sponsorship opportunities and can be contacted through his website, www.SamRandonRacing.com

Original article courtesy of Colston Crawford, Derbyshire Live