In his latest column for Crash.net, Martyn Bell looks back over the penultimate round of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship at Brands Hatch, and talks about his crusade to take the BTCC to Cadwell Park.
I think it went a lot better at Brands Hatch than the last time we were there for sure, but we didn’t enjoy the results that we did at
Knockhill.
It took until the last race for the car to feel good and we do struggle round Brands Hatch – we always have, even in the Kumho days. In the first race, after lap ten, we had no tyres left and the car was understeering all over the place. When I came back in, we took the tyres off and they were shredded, they were that bad. We made some changes for the second race but broke a driveshaft on the green flag lap. I suppose there is some consolation in that, because if we had broken it on the actual race start, we would probably have had a shorter car because we had quite a few people behind us - so we’ll take that as a stroke of good luck.
From the back in the third race, we got past some of the newcomers at the start and then Chris Stockton caused a Safety Car. It was quite enjoyable after that, I was catching Adam Jones for a while but then the times stabilised. Emmet O’Brien was talking to me and he said ‘you have a hell of a job with a
BMW round here anyday of the week’ so we are happy with how it went considering Brands Hatch doesn’t suit us. We had sponsors there who know we are short of testing and that the budget has been low, but they want me to test through the winter and come out fighting in 2007.
