Nicholls & Clarke (N&C) has announced its sponsorship of Mark Cole, the professional motorsport race driver, for the prestigious 2015 Porsche Carrera Cup GB championship, forming part of the company’s 140 year celebrations.
The Porsche Carrera Cup GB is the fastest and most successful single marque GT racing Championship in the UK. The action is transmitted through ITV Sport, the official broadcast partner for the Cup. A number of races will be transmitted live on ITV4, as well as highlights screened on both ITV1 and ITV4, whereby over the course of the season, broadcasts reach an annual audience in excess of 20 million viewers. The championship sits alongside the TOCA BTCC (British Touring Car Championship) series. The BTCC is the second largest attended motor sport race series in the UK outside the F1 GP at Silverstone.
Mark Cole has over 25 years experience of racing, having won the same Porsche Carrera Cup championship back in 2002 in its first year in the UK. Mark returns to racing following an eight-year sabbatical. In the past, Mark has been a race winner in Formula Ford 1600 during the late 80s and early 90s. He finished 4th in the Renault Spider Cup 1999, was Vice-Champion in the Autobytel Lotus Elise Championship in 2001, a race winner in the Britcar Series and is latterly a McLaren Automotive instructor and coach to new McLaren owners, staff and guests at events globally.
The prestigious association with the Porsche Carrera Cup 2015 will not only help to potentially increase the awareness of N&C to the wider marketplace, it will help to better define the company’s positioning in the market – as a supplier, manufacturer and distributor of quality, high performance building products.
The Carrera Cup is essentially a one-make series and the cars are all identical. Usually having a 3-4 year life cycle before Porsche upgrade to the next generation. The latest cars are the type 991 Porsche 911 GT3 ‘Cup’ car. These are pure race versions of the famous road-going GT3 model and are all built by hand at Porsche Motorsport division Weissach, Germany. Each car is powered by identical, sealed, rear-mounted 460 BHP flat-six engines. The racing edition of the iconic 911 coupe has thrilled spectators around the UK in support of the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) since 2002.
Over the past decade, the Porsche Carrera Cup GB has become an established competition with over 30,000 enthusiastic spectators attending the majority of races, and crowds totalling approximately 370,000 visit the circuits in England and Scotland over the course of the season, to enjoy the high octane action.
2015 is a milestone for Nicholls & Clarke as the Company celebrates 140 years of supplying building materials to the construction industry in Great Britain.