Well that’s two more meetings out of the way this season and it think you could say they gave us mixed results...
All things considered - after what happened to us on Saturday - two finishes at
Croft wasn’t something we thought we’d get after the car almost ended up on its side during practice.
I went out in the first session full of confidence with the car and when I was testing my braking, I flat spotted a tyre going into Tower. It says in the track guide that you brake late for Tower, but I think Selby was just a bit too late. I went into the pits and we just put one tyre on the car. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that, as two laps later I went through the chicane a bit hot and the front left tyre didn’t grip as it wasn’t up to temperature. I lost the car and that was it, I tried to save it three times but ended up almost on my side against the barrier. It was quite a smack really.
The guys worked really hard to get the car straight for qualifying, and then the driveshaft broke on us. We are now learning that whenever this car has a hit on the side or the back, you have to change it as it breaks the cages inside. Instead of wondering ‘Why has the bloody thing broken?’ when we’ve had a touch at the back, we now know to change it and make sure the cages are ok.
If anyone out there knows how long it takes to change a driveshaft on a
BMW, they will appreciate how well the guys did to change it as quickly as they did. I thought the session was over and I was getting out of the car before there was growling on the radio telling me to get back in and we got to at least do a shakedown going into the races.
As it was, the car wasn’t as good as it could have been on race day but we knew that on the Sunday morning and at least we managed to get a 14th and a twelfth from the weekend, it was just a shame we were forced to retire from the last race.
