In his latest column for Crash.net, Martyn Bell looks back over the eighth round of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship at Knockhill, and his best weekend yet since joining the series at the start of the year.
Before we arrived at Knockhill for the latest round of the season we had the demo in Edinburgh on Thursday evening. It was great to take the BTCC to the fans and it was fun taking the
BMW up the hill. I’m hoping it sounded good to the people standing on the side of the streets and it would be nice if some of those who came out to watch will now be interested in the BTCC if they weren’t already.
I’ve never been to Knockhill before and the first time I saw it was on Friday. To be honest with you it looked really good but I was warned in first practice by Geoff not to overcook it because I didn’t know where I was going. It meant the only running we had had was in the wet and it isn’t easy to learn a circuit in the wet, especially when you can’t go onto the kerbs.
The first race was wet and we’d had to put some new brakes on the car so I needed to bed those in and take it a little bit easy. Jones in the Lexus gave me a tap on the front wheel at the first corner after we ran side-by-side along the start-finish straight but then Richard Marsh decided to use me as a brake – he totally missed his braking point and it almost changed the BMW into a coupe.
The lads did good to get the car ready in the time between races and I’ll admit that I was sitting in the motor home wondering why we had made the trip, but I beat myself up and went out for race two. I was pleased with how that went and we put in consistent lap-times even though we had decided to go with a conservative wet set-up and dry tyres because we weren’t sure how the track would be – so it was hard work.
