When we went to Thruxton for the first time with the
BMW earlier in the year, neither ourselves nor West Surrey Racing had had the cars very long, so we were all still learning and then obviously they threw the different tyres at us too which didn’t help. It’s a track that is immensely tough on tyres, but being rear-wheel drive the BMW shares the tyre wear between front and rear, which does help us at a lot of the circuits. We’ve worked on the set-up throughout the season too, which I think showed second time around.
We always knew the front-wheel drives were going to be struggling at
Thruxton, because the front tyres are doing the braking, the steering, the accelerating and everything else. We knew we’d be in good shape on the tyre wear, and the Dunlop tyres performed brilliantly on the car.
Qualifying wasn’t the best; it’s one of the things we’re struggling with at the moment. Hopefully we can improve on that for next year so we can be up at the front where Colin is, and I think that will help us get some better results. We had a good first race, though I made a few mistakes which lost us a few places. In race two I had a terrible start and again made work for myself – I just lifted the clutch a little bit too quickly, the revs dropped and once that happens the flywheel on the car is so light that you need so many revs just to get the thing off the line, so we bogged down. We came back and got a decent reverse grid for race three, though, which we capitalised on to take the win.
