As an added bonus this year Ben Collins, ex Stig from Top Gear, set the pace in each vehicle and gave each partner a chance to do a ‘hot lap’ with himself in the Palmer Jaguar JP-LM. Collins gave advice to drivers on the day and presented the winners with their prizes at the end.
Lee Donaghey from Onetek cruised home for the second year running as the overall winner and has secured his spot on the track for next year too.
Lee spoke to Comms Business at the event and said “It’s only my second track day but it has been a great day! I’m looking forward to asking Ben Collins a few questions later as he’s had quite a colourful past!”
Lee continued “The Eclipse network is going to be key for my business over the next twelve months. From the conversations I have had with Henry (West) there is still some margin to be squeezed out of our existing network. I think the over committing of the bandwidth is going to be a key strategy for us. Even if you are only squeezing a few hundred pounds extra out of a service it could be the difference between winning the deal or losing it. Once you get that one service into a customer it allows you to sell in all the other services on top of that.”
Pete Tomlinson, director of product, marketing & sales at Eclipse, stated “Our Channel has grown by 35% in the last year and one of the biggest changes I see today is the mixture of partners we have. A few years ago everyone here would have been selling broadband services and now they are selling WAN, hosted products and cloud services.
Today is a great opportunity to say thank you to partners and get to know people. It’s also an opportunity to see people who think they can drive get beaten by the Stig!”
At the end of the day Ben Collins said “Everyone came here with a smile and as the day went on the smiles just got bigger. All the cars are in one piece, nothing caught fire and there were some really quick drivers here which were good to see.”
When asked if he was nervous someone might get near his lap times he responded “I was a little nervous when one guy put his hand on my knee when we did the hot lap but I soon corrected that by screeching into the corner at about 120mph!”
The winners on the day included:
Overall winner (he actually won every race) – Lee Donaghey – Director - Onetek
BMW GTP M4 – Graham Digby – Service Manager - Adept Telecom
Caterham 7 Sprint – John Watkins – Field Service Engineer - Wifi Spark
Ariel Atom – Henry West – Head of Channel – Eclipse
