In his latest column for Crash.net, Martyn Bell looks back over the fourth round of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship at Thruxton, and a hectic weekend for the Geoff Steel Racing team.
There has been a lot of late nights and head scratching since
Oulton Park, the sequential gearbox is in and I have to say it is fantastic. We don’t have any homologated gears and aren’t sure what gears we need, so we had to go with a bit of a guess at Thruxton and down the straights we ran out of puff a little bit but it was certainly a step forward. We just seemed to have one problem after another though!
Geoff Steel and the team have been up and down the country getting the car ready for Thruxton and have been making parts, and mountings and prop-shafts and there really were days of work that went into it. It certainly wasn’t a case of just bolting in the new gearbox and away we go and I don’t think people realise just how much time and effort goes into the preparation – I certainly wouldn’t if I wasn’t involved. The guys are working so hard with this
BMW and it will come good. We have a lot of support out there and it was evident at Thruxton and the work that these guys are doing to get it right is fantastic.
It would have been nice to go and test before the weekend but the car wasn’t completed until Thursday so it was straight from the workshop into the trailer to head off to the circuit. All the things that we want to do with the car take time, as sometimes you call up for parts and they aren’t ready and we don’t have the clout of the big teams so we have to wait or make them ourselves. It has been a difficult year but it has gone fast and I can’t believe that it’s June already!
