After solid practice results for us at
Oulton Park, qualifying went quite well. We have to remember that I hadn’t sat in the car since Rockingham and that wasn’t the best weekend really. Although it started well, it turned into a bit of a disaster with the engine problem putting me out after practice. I had to look back to my performance at
Brands Hatch as the last time I’d really spent a lot of time at the wheel and that was a bloody long time ago! We’d made some alterations to suit me and blown the cobwebs off during practice and made some changes to get more from the car.
Of course the most recent car I’d raced going into the weekend wasn’t the SEAT, but the Lamborghini in the British GT Championship. The Lamborghi is a beast, it has the engine behind you and is rear wheel drive while the SEAT is front-wheel drive, engine at the front, but it didn’t take long to get back in the grove again. At the end of the day, if you can drive a car, you can drive a car – although I had to look at the controls for a bit to refresh my mind and remember where everything was! But it wasn’t as much of a jump as you might think if you put the Gallardo and the Toledo next to each other, so it didn’t take me long to get back into the swing of things.
The only downside looking to race day was that the forecast was for rain – as I’d not had the chance to drive the car in the wet. In fact, I probably knew as much about driving it in the rain as any of you guys reading this! But there is no time to hang around in this game and I knew after qualifying that if it was pouring down on race day I just had to get in the car and get on with the job, similar to what I did in the Lamborghini. Although that was dry, I just had to get in the car and do the job. Then again, I did know that I could count on the experience the team has from running this car in the past if I needed it.
