Chacombe racing driver Darren Turner and his JMW Motorsport teammate, Rob Bell, rounded off a good season in the Le Mans series with a podium finish at Silverstone.

The British duo came away with their best result of the season, despite a late race penalty that pushed them down to third place.

It was Bell’s turn to start the race and he did so from pole position after a great lap in Saturday’s qualifying session, which secured their best starting position of the year.

He handed the No 92 Aston Martin Vantage over to Turner just before the one-hour mark, who set off, chased by a pack of Ferraris and Porsches.

The pattern continued throughout the 1,000km race and from the outside it looked like they were about to pull off a textbook win, but an extra stop still needed to be squeezed in.

Turner said: “We can’t run as many laps in a stint as our competitors.

“So we knew we would have to come in for a ‘splash and dash’ in the final stint. We accounted for this and were racing hard to make sure we built up enough of a buffer to preserve second place.”

What they did not account for was an additional pit stop in the form of a stop-go penalty, served on Bell for ‘not respecting the track limits’.

“We got a penalty that wasn’t justified,” said Turner. “We didn’t do anything different to all the other cars but we were penalised for it.”

Despite the penalty, Bell took the chequered flag after 1,000km in third place, taking JMW Motorsport’s best result of 2010.