After the season opener at
Oulton Park, we headed even further north to
Knockhill in Scotland – the only time we go outside England this season.
From the moment we arrived there, we were on the pace. With Guy and Ben having moved on, we had just the one car for the weekend which meant we couldn’t do as much during practice as we could with two cars. Then, you can send the cars out to do different things, so instead we could only do half the work. Normally that would be a disadvantage, but we had already done a test at Knockhill which meant we had a good set-up in the bag and were on the money right away.
Unfortunately, Peter lost his times in qualifying for race one, but I qualified in a strong second place for race two and was only a tenth of a second behind Allan Simonsen in the Christians in Motorsport car. Despite starting from the pitlane in race one, we finished in eighth place and then in race two, I started well and I was able to stay close to Allan in second place. Peter got pushed off when he went back out onto the track after the pit-stop, but when other cars were later excluded from results, we ended up with a fifth place finish.
In all, six cars were excluded from the results at Knockhill; one in the first race and then five in the second. I think those exclusions did overshadow the weekend a little bit but in my opinion, they were justified. The Clerk of the Course and the administrators of the series had come down strongly on drivers who were deemed to have ignored yellow flags in qualifying, and both Peter and Paddy Shovlin lost their times and were forced to start from the pitlane. That was a huge penalty in the mixed weather conditions as it meant Peter went out to start that first race on cold tyres and a damp track, which explained why he made a mistake early on. It wasn’t his fault at all – it was one of those things.
