BTCC: Turkington takes charge
The rear-wheel-drive BMWS are always strong at Oulton. But they weren’t supposed to be this good with extra ballast on board for 2018
Oulton Park is supposed to be a boon for rear-wheel-drive cars in the British Touring Car Championship – and so this was the weekend when Colin Turkington was supposed to power his WSR BMW 125i M Sport back into title contention.
Turkington did, and he put himself back at the head of the points table, but it was far from easy. The traction-heavy sections of the Cheshire track are what play to the strengths of the rear-wheel-drive cars, but there was a rule tweak buried in the regulations at the start of the year that has made life a lot tougher for WSR.
An extra 30kg has been handed to the rear-driven cars to even out any perceived advantage. And Turkington arrived with 39kg of success ballast, which meant he was facing an uphill struggle from the outset. Only Turkington and Andrew Jordan of the rear-wheel-drive contenders could break into the top 10 in qualifying, and Jordan’s BMW (free of success ballast) was the most racy in fourth. The times, it seems, have changed. A competitive grid and the extra ballast on the BMWS mean that the playing field in the BTCC is a lot more level than it has been in previous seasons.
Turkington was still battling to perfect the handling in qualifying and struggled through the opening race – even though he was one of the few to progress, from ninth to sixth – but then it clicked. His charge to victory in the second race featured some excellent overtakes – including robbing Tom Chilton’s Motorbase Ford Focus of the lead on lap five – and it launched him to the top of the points. A third place in race three, which completed a WSR podium lockout, was the perfect sign-off too.
“As soon as we started race two I could feel that the car was in a much better place,” said Turkington. “I could race forward. We just looked at the data after race one and worked hard on getting a balanced car rather than one that is dominated by one axle over another. Even in race three, it was tougher with the weight. But I maximised my strengths where I was strong. Jack Goff [Eurotech Racing Honda Civic Type R] behind me was much quicker in the fast corners, but I accentuated where I was strong, such as in the traction areas, to maintain my advantage. You have to enjoy weekends like this, because they don’t come along very often.”
It was a great weekend for WSR, with Jordan adding second in the finale (collected after Rob Austin’s HMS Alfa Romeo broke its gearbox) to a third and a fourth in the opening two events. He wasn’t on the ultimate pace last weekend, but walked away with only one point fewer than Turkington.
Rob Collard claimed the win in race three to complete the rout for WSR. The former Independents Trophy winner hadn’t scored a single 2018 podium until last weekend,
and he thinks that he has now turned a corner personally as well as with the car.
Collard’s win was preceded by ninth and sixth in the opening two races, boosted by a solid qualifying session, in which he was 12th. Like Turkington, he was another to overtake (which was a rarity last weekend) and he looked like he’s back to his old self.
“It was a big thing to bounce back from the accident I had at Silverstone last year, and perhaps it took more out of me than I thought at the start of the season,” said Collard, who suffered concussion in a monster accident in the penultimate round in 2017, which ruled him out of the season’s showdown. “We’ve just been a little bit on the back foot. And in this championship, with the way it is at the moment, you just can’t afford that. I’m very pleased and I’ve got my mojo back. I’d never won here either, so this has ticked another box for me.”
While the BMWS made hay, the other big winners of the weekend were the Motorbase Performance team, and Chilton in particular. Third place in qualifying was helped by arriving at the track with no ballast (just like team-mates Sam Tordoff and James Cole), and Chilton progressed to second in race one.
Chilton led race two from the start, and used his head to fend off the threat of Turkington and factory Honda driver Matt Neal. The Ford had the softer Dunlops fitted and Chilton knew, with 66kg onboard, that he was likely to be a sitting target.
“I could have defended, but then I would have backed us up into traffic,” said Chilton. “I made the decision to let the faster cars go. Colin was too good for me and Neal was lighter. It was all about banking the most points that I could, and a second podium was a success.”
Seventh in the finale made Chilton the third highest scorer over the weekend on which Motorbase bounced back. Cole was in the top 10 in all three races, which included a fifth in race two. Tordoff should have been well in the mix too, but his car erupted into flames in race two when a broken bracket caused a fuel line to rupture, and that put him out of race three too.
Neal’s second place in race two was a highlight on a track that hasn’t traditionally been kind to him, and he was just happy to keep his challenge ticking over. He fared much better than Honda team-mate Dan Cammish, who was struggling with the fact that he had no experience of the circuit in a front-wheel-drive car. Damage and a puncture also restricted him to just a handful of points.
Beyond the main players at the head of the pack, there was a subsection of drivers who had to use tactics to try to earn anything from the three races. The top three in the points coming to Cheshire were Ciceley Motorsport Mercedes
A-class racer Adam Morgan, Power
Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra ace Josh
Cook and Speedworks Motorsport
Toyota Avensis man Tom Ingram.
Morgan summed up the problem for the trio: “The weight really screws you. It hurts coming out of the chicane and up Clay Hill it hurts; out of the hairpin and out of Lodge too. It’s everywhere.”
Morgan hauled his 75kg to 19th on the grid and could only circulate in the pack and improve one place in race one. But then the weekend turned: free from extra lead, the Merc was ready to pounce thereafter.
“In race two we had no weight on and the car came alive,” explained Morgan. “I got very lucky and people fell off in front of me and I was able to get my way through to 11th. I was hoping for some luck, but I didn’t quite get into the reversed-grid draw. But, when we put the softs on for race three, the car was a total rocketship and I made it to fifth. Given what we were facing coming here, I’m really happy – it’s a good haul of points and I’ve not been on fire [unlike last year, when his car was a mobile bonfire in race two].”
Ingram’s strategy had been the same – take the pain in the opening race and then bank on solid points from that point forward. It worked to a degree, and he scored a 10th in race two and improved to sixth in race three, only jumped by Morgan as the Toyota man got involved with Neal at Druids while battling through the order.
Ingram was, nevertheless, looking at the positives: “We haven’t actually lost a lot of points to the leader – I think we’re just a few more off the lead leaving as we were coming into the weekend, it’s just that there is a different leader now in Turkington.
“We’re also now fourth, so we have less weight for Croft in two weeks’ time. So
I’m going to look at the positives from the weekend in that we haven’t actually lost any ground and we are lighter going forward, so these are all good things.”
Cook joined his two title rivals in reverse engineering his weekend, but he was the one to fall foul. He collected 17th in race one with the 66kg of ballast and was ready to mount a charge in race two – until he got to the Avenue on lap one and he was spat onto the grass following unavoidable contact ahead. That totally ruined his weekend and left him with only five points to show from the three races – and these are the fine margins of the BTCC.
Of those carrying big weight into the weekend, Goff was probably the standout performer. Qualifying sixth with 48kg on the car was a truly stunning lap – although he was put in the shade by Eurotech Racing Honda team-mate and race-one winner Matt Simpson (see page 47). Eighths in races one and two may not seem like a lot, but he bounced up to fourth in the reversed-grid finale, which meant he scored more than those around him in the title fight. He left the track joint second in the points with Morgan.
But some drivers are never happy. “I’m slightly disappointed with that,” said Goff. “I was over the moon with qualifying with the amount of weight that I had on the car. I had a rub with Rob Austin’s HMS Alfa Romeo in race two and that lost me two or three places, and if it hadn’t been for that I would have been on reversed-grid pole position and it would have been a completely different story.”
Given the travails of some of his rivals, his pessimism seems misplaced. After all, Goff is only 12 points away from Turkington at the top of the table.
But the next stop on the tour is Croft in North Yorkshire, which is almost built to play to the BMW’S strengths. As Ingram put it at the end of the Oulton weekend: “You never give up, but looking ahead to the next round, we’re all aiming to be best of the rest again, aren’t we?”
He’s not wrong, and that will make Turkington’s smile even broader.