It seems like a long time since my season kicked off at
Brands Hatch. To come away with a seventh, a sixth and a fifth almost exceeded our own expectations considering we had only done half a day of running before the weekend – and that wasn’t even a proper test, it was just to get the cobwebs off the car and myself and let me get used to a front-wheel drive car a little bit. To go to Brands Hatch and start the final race from the front row, and come away with the results that we did, was all a bit overwhelming.
We knew we would miss
Thruxton and
Croft because of the team’s WTCC commitments so we came out of Brands Hatch looking forward to Rockingham and a pretty local circuit for me. It looked good from a performance point of view and it would have been good to have three good results as it would have set us up well for the break.
Arriving at Rockingham I was second quickest in the first practice session, and bearing in mind that we didn’t do the media day there, it was encouraging to only be two tenths behind Darren Turner and know there was more to come from the car. Then we were running P4 in the second session and the engine dropped a valve which put an end to things there and then.
We knew it was a pretty serious problem straight away and we didn’t have a spare as the budget didn’t stretch to having one in the truck, so that was us out of contention for the whole weekend. That was disappointing anyway, but it was made worse as my main sponsor was there and we had a lot of guests coming on the Sunday. They still came, but it wasn’t the same without the car on the circuit. However, we made the most of it and I was still just as busy on the Sunday without racing! It’s just a shame that there has been such a big gap for me between then and my next outing at
Oulton Park.
After the disappointment of Rockingham came my enforced break from action, as GR Asia headed to Zandvoort and Pau to race in the WTCC with Tom and Emmet – which left me watching on the sidelines.
