Life in the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship has started for Martyn Bell after he made his BTCC debut at Brands Hatch. In his latest exclusive Crash.net column, Martyn looks back over his first weekend as a BTCC racer...
Well it just didn’t happen on Saturday did it and we didn’t even get to qualifying. I broke the gearbox in the second practice session and we lost fifth gear which is a shame because it felt like a bloody good lap too! We also broke the casing, one of the few bits that we don’t have, and it left the boys looking around to try and find one.
It seemed that it was another case of everything being against us as we were just starting to really feel the car and dial it in and it put us really onto the back foot – but I guess it left us with only one way to go and that was forwards. Even if we had to have a four speed gearbox though, we were determined to be on the line and ready for the first race of the season and on a scale of one to ten, I’d have said the chances of us fixing the car was about a 9.5.
The thing we had to remember after Saturday is that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and that we are here for the rest of the year and beyond. We could see that we weren’t on the pace, but we have to work to get on to the pace and we will get there. The media day had been a real eye-opener for us and left us thinking ‘Oh shit, we’re well off it’ but as we dial ourselves in we will move forward and we were starting to get closer. I said in December that we have a mountain to climb this season, but the car is good enough and when everything gels we will start to get results. It was disappointing and it is disappointing for the team but we’ll keep smiling and we are bloody determined to succeed.
