Over the winter we managed to secure Accident Exchange as the main sponsor on the car, and that has really given us a boost financially to make the team better, improve what we had before and move forward technically. That’s a great help, and in pre-season testing we’ve been fastest in both official tests, albeit by the tiniest of margins at
Brands Hatch – we’re setting ourselves up for a big fall I think!
At the moment it looks good and it’s great to repay Accident Exchange with some good results, but we need to know what the other guys are doing too. Have the SEATs got their boost wound up? Who knows? I think all you can read into pre-season testing is what you’re doing yourself. At the end of the day everybody knows what weight they’ve got in the car and what’s going on, but I don’t think you can take much notice of the other guys.
We can look at the lap times and say we’re under the pole time from last year, so we’re obviously not too slow, but we’ll see. It really doesn’t matter what we’ve done in testing so far. It gives us confidence and a boost in the team, but we’ve got to go and do it at Brands Hatch when it matters. It’s all well-and-good doing it on a test day, but if it’s not there in qualifying then you’ve got a miserable weekend ahead. At the moment everyone is free to do what they want, but when we get to Brands Hatch for round one we’ll know the truth.
SEAT are going to be interesting. Both
Jason Plato and Darren Turner have been very close in the times so far – I think they were ninth and tenth at Brands, which doesn’t seem all that fast, but that diesel engine in the World Touring Car Championship certainly looked very, very quick. If you watched on-board with Augusto Farfus, it had a lot more straight-line speed than the
BMW did, and the BMW is not slow in a straight line.
