We don’t have any full-time staff on the team – it’s just me, my brother and my dad who prep the car over the weekends and in any other spare time we get. Thruxton wasn’t a good weekend for us, but hopefully we can go to
Croft and try to put that all behind us.
Because the engine went bang it had to go back to
BMW in Munich straight after the meeting. I had to drive pretty much a two-day round trip to drop the engine off and the same again to pick it up again afterwards.
We then shook the car down at
Mallory Park earlier this week and it looks like the installation went fine. The engine feels very strong – it’s a 2007-spec one with all the latest tweaks, so it should be good. We are also back on the Dunlop tyres we knew from before rather than the ones we had to use at
Thruxton, so we know where we are set-up wise as well.
We are heading off to Croft feeling pretty confident. The Bee-Ems have not been there before so again it’s going to be a learning curve, but the car seems to thrive on the high-speed stuff, and Croft has a good mixture of that and some slower corner exits.
We are obviously racing for the Independents’ title this year, but I think we have to focus on both championships and just get whatever results we can. Sometimes it works in your favour – for instance you can finish second outright and be the top indie by maybe eight or nine places – and other times it’s different. I think we’ve really got to race for the overall championship, and if we are competing against the manufacturers maybe the points don’t matter so much.
We have dropped out of the title hunt at the moment, but it can all change around very quickly. The main thing we have to do is get top six finishes. That’s where we were at the start of the season, and where we need to get back to again.
We have a car we know is absolutely spot-on and capable of race wins, and hopefully this weekend we will be able to get back on that trail. I’m looking forward to getting back to where we should be again.
I’ll speak to you soon,
Mat
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