Teenager James Reilly on how he became the youngest European driver to complete a 24-hour race at Silverstone - and how it nearly never happened

Teenage Canterbury schoolboy James Reilly is the youngest European driver to have completed a 24-hour race - but came close to not even qualifying!

Reilly is part of the elite sports programme at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys.

He became the youngest driver to compete in the BRSCC Citroen C1 Endurance 24-hour race at Silverstone in May when he was the youngest driver outside of America to start a 24-hour motor race.

He completed just over seven hours of driving across four stints. His fastest lap time was 3min04.897sec during his final stint.

But he revealed: “I’d just done my GCSEs. I had two exams on the day we were meant to be travelling up to Silverstone so we cut it extremely fine before qualifying.

“We had four minutes to spare before I wouldn’t have been able to qualify for the race! It was very tight.”

Despite his late arrival after his mandarin exam, Reilly’s experience at Silverstone still proved to be a memorable one.

He reflected: “That was brilliant to be able to drive for such a long time, going into the night. I haven’t really experienced anything like that before at all.

“It was oddly calming. It’s strange to say when you are going so fast but being able to drive for hours on end was a great experience.”

He conceded driving for such long periods of time comes with its challenges, though.

He said: “The race we did at Donington, it was reaching almost 60 degrees in the car! So I was struggling not to faint while going around for part of the time.

“That was completely different, I had never really had to fight as much with conditions as much as that, but I just pushed through.

“It’s a whole different ball game because you are doing the same thing every lap and you’re perfecting it as much as you can