Smith & Plowman End British GT Season on a High with Porsche Debut

Paddock Motorsport turned heads across the British GT season finale at Brands Hatch last weekend; fielding a Porsche 911 GT3 for the first time and landing a Team of the Weekend award. The Paddock team went into the two-hour race in Kent with a very different look to usual, with Mark Smith swapping out the team’s regular McLaren GT3 for the all-black Porsche 911 GT3 R. Despite the obvious challenges of a major switch of GT3 machinery within a very short timescale, Paddock still excelled, with Smith and Martin Plowman producing a near-flawless run to the flag to bank both useful experience and a haul of points to finish the campaign on a high note. Paddock’s mission to prepare the Porsche proved a true engineering challenge. Assisted by some technical staff from top German squad Black Falcon, Paddock completely rebuilt the 911 across the week, including installing the new-for-2026 Evo kit, with some parts still arriving as late as the early hours of Saturday morning. The entire race weekend would be treated as a development test, and the late nights and hard work paid off when the car performed perfectly across the race, without a single mechanical hiccup, allowing Smith and Plowman a clear run to ninth and signalling good things going into the winter break.  Mark Smith said: “I really enjoyed the entire weekend. We were testing a new car so we always needed to have humble expectations for this one. We’ve certainly shown our pace across this season, and across the last few weeks – scoring our first podium at Oulton Park and fighting for another at Snetterton. This weekend was more about learning, and we learned a ton of stuff with the Porsche which will put us in a good place, so it was a really useful weekend.” Martin Plowman said: “This weekend was never going to be about fighting for wins and podiums on the GT3 side. The switch to the Porsche was a massive technical challenge and I’m so proud with how the entire team rose to the task and made it work. There were some long nights, perhaps a few more hurdles than we expected and the challenge of adapting to a completely different driving style on the go. But, even with such limited mileage before this weekend, the car ran faultlessly and we definitely have a solid base now to work from to begin unlocking performance.