"I couldn't believe Marshy. I was watching what was going on and the Safety Car had backed everyone up and Richard just didn't seem to realise what was happening. In fairness to him, the rules say you race to the line and he was in gaggle of cars and that is what he was doing. What he didn't realise is that the finish line was covered in parked cars and he belted into someone else and side swiped my car which added insult to injury. The guys worked so hard to get it out as you can't believe how damaged it was but it didn't handle and didn't want to stop properly."
With the IS200 currently campaigned by the team no longer in production, Stockton admitted that discussion had already started over the possibility of running the latest generation of the IS next season – with the similarities between old and new cars meaning the team may simply need to just re-shell its current cars for the new campaign.
"We've been thinking about it [2008] for over three months now," he added. "I was over in Germany last week to meet Toyota Tuning Europe to talk to them about body shells. They are pretty non-plus about whether we do it or not as they are fully behind
F1 and that is where 100 per cent of their budget goes – so there will be no funding from Toyota or Lexus. However, we are still talking to them and the door hasn't been closed.
"We want to get these cars working better before we go to the big expense and effort of re-shelling them but it is a pretty easy job as they are based on nearly the same floor-pan – albeit it looks different from the outside. It is a quite an easy task and wouldn't be starting from scratch as Vauxhall did in going from the Astra to the Vectra for example.
"There is a chance of us using the new shape car next season but to be honest I'd rather go and get a
BMW and trade places with the guys up there as it is mighty hard how we are trying to do it. I'm off to buy a lottery ticket!"
