Donington Park will host a four-race GB4 season finale, with Hillspeed’s Daniel Guinchard leading Elite Motorsport duo Isaac Phelps and Ary Bansal in the drivers’ championship. Feeder Series spoke to the three title protagonists ahead of the final round.

By George Sanderson

With six rounds completed, the GB4 Championship comes to Donington Park for its last act of the 2025 season. The series has celebrated 10 different winners and 16 different podium finishers whilst welcoming a championship-record 28 drivers to the grid since the curtain-raiser at the same venue in April.

Daniel Guinchard of Hillspeed leads the drivers’ championship on 341 points, 21 clear of Isaac Phelps, who leapfrogged his Elite Motorsport teammate Ary Bansal to slot into second following his two victories in the penultimate round at Brands Hatch. Phelps enters the finale with 320 points, just four ahead of Bansal. The third Elite of Alexandros Kattoulas is 48 points further adrift in a distant fourth.

The three title protagonists are set to compete in an expanded four-race weekend at Donington Park following the cancellation of the reverse-grid final race of the previous round. A crash for Max Murray – the younger brother of Indy NXT driver and GB4 alumnus Sebastian Murray – in the Ginetta Junior Championship race on Sunday morning caused delays that culminated in the postponement of the 18th round of the GB4 season. Stefan Bostandjiev will start from pole in that race, scheduled to be the final event of the weekend.

Guinchard: ‘It would mean the world’ to win GB4 title

Hillspeed’s Daniel Guinchard should go by only one nickname this season: Mr Consistent.

The 19-year-old returned to racing this year, having stepped away in July 2023 because of budget restrictions, and has demonstrated excellent racecraft and consistency throughout his 2025 campaign.

Despite only taking two victories, half the total of his closest challenger Phelps, Guinchard is the only driver in the top six to have finished every race inside the points. In his 17 races, he has finished 14 inside the top seven, with half of those being podiums. Winning the drivers’ title, Guinchard told Feeder Series, ‘would mean the world’ to him.

“There’s been a lot of hard work this year and it’s not been straightforward,” he said, “but for a first year back in racing, it would never be straightforward. I’m glad I’m in the position that I can take the title.”

Guinchard’s calculated approach means he has not only finished on the podium at every round bar one but also stayed away from incidents throughout the season. The Polish-British driver and his Hillspeed team have also made smart strategic calls, such as in the reverse-grid race at Oulton Park, where an early swap to wet tyres helped him gain eight places on his way to fourth in difficult conditions. By comparison, his Elite Motorsport rivals faltered, with 10th place for Bansal, 21st for Kattoulas and 22nd for Phelps.

Even when luck hasn’t been on his side, Guinchard hasn’t panicked. After suffering an electrical problem in qualifying for the fifth round of the season at Silverstone, the Pole lined up 17th and 21st for the first two races but finished both in 11th. He gained 11 places on the opening lap of the reverse-grid final race too, finishing sixth.

“It’s not always about your good weekends,” he told Feeder Series at the time. “It’s about how good your bad weekends are.”

Silverstone marked the only round of the season in which Guinchard did not finish on the podium. Nevertheless, that round cost him only one point to Bansal, his nearest rival in the championship at the time.

His first notable error came in the most recent round at Brands Hatch, where battling for the lead with Phelps in race two caused him to lose second place to Bansal too. Holding the inside line at Hawthorn Bend, Phelps squeezed Guinchard out, enabling Bansal to capitalise on the Hillspeed driver’s compromised momentum.

“I’m a racing driver. I’ll always go for the gaps if they are there. There was a gap and then there wasn’t pretty quickly,” Guinchard said. “I don’t regret anything. I’m glad I had a go.”

As a result, in both races, Phelps took victory ahead of Bansal in second and Guinchard in third, cutting his championship lead from 35 points to 21. Still, the Hillspeed driver wasn’t too disappointed.

“We maximised what we could with the pace we had. We didn’t quite have enough pace to challenge for the wins,” he said. “Donington will suit us more.”

Looking ahead to the finale, Guinchard said he was confident about his chances, especially with two reverse-grid races.

“There’s more overtaking that can be done at Donington,” he said. “We’ve made big steps with the car throughout the year.”

Guinchard led the championship following the first visit to Donington Park and has only briefly relinquished it once during the second round of the season at Silverstone. Having been out of the car for an extended period, the 19-year-old was surprised by the early form that set up the remainder of his title charge.

“I knew we’d be strong sort of midway through the year and towards the end, but at the start I really didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “We hit the ground running, and we kept that momentum all year. To be leading by over 20 points in such a tight championship, it’s good.”

Phelps: Brands Hatch a ‘good confidence boost’

Despite taking four victories this season – the most of any driver on the 2025 GB4 grid – Isaac Phelps has gone under the radar for most of his title challenge. Two victories in the previous round at Brands Hatch elevated him to second in the drivers’ championship after he sat third at the end of the previous three rounds.

Phelps began 2025 in electric form, taking double pole for the season opener at Donington Park and converting that into a win and a second place. He won again in race two at Silverstone but then could not take to the top step for the following 10 races, featuring just once on the podium in that time thanks to a second-place finish in race one at Snetterton.

“[I] just had a load of bad luck at Oulton [Park], which set us back a lot in the points,” Phelps told Feeder Series following that race. At Oulton Park, the 16-year-old Briton had fallen victim to misguided tyre choices in the tricky conditions of races one and three, finishing 17th and 22nd respectively.

Though he has not retired from any race this season, Phelps has finished 12th or lower on four occasions, costing him valuable points to Guinchard in the championship. But following ‘an amazing weekend’ at Brands Hatch, where he claimed pole position by 0.511 seconds over teammate Bansal before winning in both races, he now has the bit between his teeth.

“We’ve been blistering in pace the whole time,” he told Feeder Series. “We were even the fastest at Brands Indy [in practice], so it was a good confidence boost then, and then to turn up to quali and have the pace that we had was just amazing.”

Phelps demonstrated his confidence in race two when, having fended off the attacks of Guinchard, he sprinted clear to finish a comfortable 9.334s clear of his title rivals. It was the biggest margin of victory recorded this season, and only the second dry race to be won by more than five seconds – the other being Kattoulas’ 6.582-second race one victory at the first Silverstone round.

“When the tyres came in, I just looked behind the lap after and I couldn’t see anyone,” Phelps said. “It was so weird because the lap before, they were on me. It was a really weird feeling but really nice to see for me.”

Like Guinchard, Phelps expects Donington Park to provide more overtaking opportunities, which could prove crucial with two reverse-grid races to come. Phelps is already confirmed to be starting the postponed reverse-grid race from 12th on the grid, meaning extra overtaking opportunities could help him gain crucial points in the championship.

“It might throw it open a little bit for the title,” he explained. “We had really good pace at Donington at the start of the season… so I think we can continue that as well and try to keep gaining on points.”

The battle between the Elite Motorsport trio of Phelps, Bansal and Kattoulas has been close throughout the campaign. The team secured podium lockouts for the first time in GB4 history, achieving the feat in race two at both Donington Park and Silverstone in the opening rounds of the season. 

Elite have maintained positive intra-team relationships throughout the season, and their drivers have demonstrated strong teamwork. At Brands Hatch, for example, it was Phelps’ defensive driving that enabled Bansal to overtake Guinchard for second place in race two. Phelps expects this to continue in the season finale, saying that the relationship between him and Bansal is ‘the same as it’s always been’ despite everything at stake.

“There’s not really been any incidents between us [for] the whole year, so there’s no reason for it to become a little rivalry or anything.”

Bansal: ‘I just need to make sure I’m doing the right things at the right times’

For the majority of the season, it appeared that Ary Bansal would be the lead challenger to Daniel Guinchard’s title charge. Yet he now enters the season finale in third place after falling behind Phelps following the Brands Hatch weekend.

“After the qualifying pace that Isaac had, I knew that it would be difficult to maintain P2 in the championship,” Bansal admitted to Feeder Series. “The good thing is that the overall gap to Guinchard has closed down.”

The pace deficit to his teammate was something of a surprise for the 15-year-old Indian, who said after Phelps’ double pole and win that it was ‘quite interesting to see how Isaac has managed to gain so much pace’. Still, history could be on Bansal’s side heading into the season finale.

At the season opener, Bansal set the fastest lap around the Donington Park circuit in the first two of three races, both times having started third. An incident with Jack Taylor in race one cost him his front wing, forcing him into a pit stop and a 21st-place finish, but he rebounded well to win in race two. He then gained five positions in the reverse-grid race to finish fifth, 0.611s behind Guinchard in fourth.

Bansal also led the Elite trio home in their podium lockout in race two, with Phelps second and Kattoulas third. At the time, Elite Motorsport team principal Eddie Ives told Feeder Series that Guinchard had not been as fast as the Elite drivers in the races, and Bansal will be hoping for more of the same this weekend.

“Regarding the circuit, I think as a team we will be quite good,” he told Feeder Series. “Guinchard wasn’t completely out of the fight in that weekend, the first weekend. This is coming back for the last round, so everything has evolved. Drivers have gotten better, it’s changed, everything has become more competitive now.”

As for his own strategy heading into the final round of the season, Bansal remains focused on the task at hand, saying he ‘needs to make sure [he is] doing the right things at the right times’ in order to mount a proper challenge.

Despite everything at stake, he won’t let the pressure distract him.

“It’s definitely a small factor,” he said, “but when I’m driving, I seem to basically forget about it and just drive fast.”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography