With his privately-run Jacksons Motorsport outfit, Mat Jackson has been one of the undoubted stars of this year’s Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship, and to underline that point he went and triumphed in the final race of the campaign at Thruxton to set himself up in style for 2008. Here the Crash.net columnist reflects on a job well done...
After all the damage of
Brands Hatch back in August we needed to put a new rear chassis leg in the car, which is the main part of the chassis at the rear. That was on order from Germany, so it was looking increasingly unlikely that we were going to be able to make it to the penultimate round at
Knockhill, but fortunately it turned up on the Friday a week prior to the race meeting. The body shop worked on it that night and got it prepped ready for us to work on it on the Sunday, and in the end it all turned out ok.
We struggled a bit for pace in qualifying at Knockhill and lined up twelfth, and then we had a coming-together with
Matt Neal in race one. It was annoying, because we went up there leading the Independents’ Championship and came away again in third place.
Colin Turkington scored a lot more than us at Knockhill, which put him in a much stronger position for the final round than we were in and after that to try and close the gap to him was always going to be extremely tough. Scoring just three points put us under much more pressure heading to
Thruxton.
The Independents’ Championship for us was the most realistic one; whatever happened in the main drivers’ championship was all a bonus. We knew it would require a lot of bad luck for both Colin and Mike Jordan at Thruxton though if we were still to stand a chance. Mike did have a terrible weekend there, but unfortunately for us Colin had a good run. We managed to pull back second in the championship in the end; it was just a shame Knockhill cost us the title.
