Looking back to the start of the year at
Brands Hatch, the biggest change is that we can run consistently with the car now. Previously you could do a banzai lap and that was it, it wanted to swap ends, but now you can look at our times and they are within a tenth every time. We just need to step up to that next level now. A 49sec was the fastest lap this weekend and we were doing 51s so we are two seconds off the pace, but back in April we were seven. This is a very difficult school to be a member of and is a difficult club. One day we may be prefects, but at the moment we are first years.
If you think about it, while we’ve been here before, it might as well have been with a different car. We had a different gearbox, different spring rates, different data and so it wasn’t the same car at all. In the first lap of free practice, just warming the tyres through, I went quicker than on the last time we were here. It is one of those circuits where the calmer you are, the quicker you go and it is difficult to do that on race day when the red mist is out and you’ve had a nudge from one and a nudge from the other. I do feel that we can now race people, like we did at
Knockhill, and it is nice to feel confident enough in the car to go out there and do it. There is a lot more to come from me and the car, and with the winter testing programme we are putting together we should be ok.
The eagle eyed amongst you will have seen that the windscreen on the car this weekend didn’t have Quayside on it and this is part on my ‘one man mission’ to get the BTCC to Cadwell Park – and wouldn’t that be good. We put ‘Try Cadwell Park’ on the windscreen, with Quayside’s permission of course, and we are doing something different for
Silverstone which will see Quayside go on the bonnet. It was good of them to let us do that. We just wanted to let Jonathan Palmer see it and it is good PR for Cadwell. The circuit is on my doorstep and I don’t care what anyone else says, it is the best circuit in the country – almost like a little Nurburgring. If any of these Southerners haven’t driven round it, then they should get up there as they’d be in for a treat.
