It’s a BTC BTCC: Cook profits as favourites fail
This year the BTC Honda ace normally has a tale of woe. But last weekend that applied to everyone else as Cook claimed a double win
This may be a slightly embellished tale from last weekend’s visit to Croft, but let’s go with it anyway, because it illustrates the scarcely believable developments in this hugely unpredictable British Touring Car Championship season.
According to one team principal, moments after Colin
Turkington had slithered his BMW helplessly into the barriers with the most uncharacteristic of mistakes at the beginning of race two, series supremo Alan Gow wandered up to our unnamed boss and said: “All we need now is for Ash Sutton not to finish.” Moments later, Turkington’s main title rival Sutton looked his gift horse in the mouth, fumbled a move on Jake Hill that he’d been succeeding in pulling off with monotonous regularity in race one, and inflicted a puncture upon his Infiniti. Gow returned to our storyteller, and remarked: “How the hell did you manage that?”
This was a weekend where Sutton and Turkington should have harvested a huge haul of points, as Croft is historically rear-wheeldrive territory. But heavy rain an hour before qualifying turned that on its head and brought the front-driven machines into play – a fantastic opportunity for title longshots Dan Cammish, Tom Ingram and Rory Butcher. Only for all three to drop the ball – or have the ball dropped for them – in spectacular fashion.
Then Turkington and Sutton, in conditions that were dry for all but a slippery opening few laps of race one, had the same happen to them on Sunday. Cammish didn’t win, but he is suddenly a very serious title threat; Ingram produced a sensational comeback from the back of the grid to end the day a winner; and it was Josh Cook – Mr Unlucky to date in 2020 – who was last man standing for pole position and a double victory in the opening two races, one of them on a stewards’ verdict after the finish.
It was no less than Cook deserved. Thanks to his tribulations to date, his BTC Racing Honda Civic Type R carried no success ballast on its arrival in North Yorkshire, and he was instantly in the mix in free practice, second only to the West Surrey Racing-run BMW 330i M Sport of Turkington. Then, in that wet qualifying session, he set only the fourth fastest time – and even that was one of many deleted across the field for breaching track limits at the Jim Clark Esses. Yet crucially, his second best was good enough for pole once the chart-topping Toyota Corolla of Ingram failed the post-session rideheight test – exactly the same thing that cost Cook a win at Oulton Park back in August.
Somehow, the older-spec Amd-run MB Motorsport Civic of Jake Hill shared the front row on a time set in the first nine minutes. Then the Audi S3, run by Amd’s sister Trade Price Cars team for Bobby Thompson, came out of the pits… “Bobby realised I was coming at a million miles an hour, attempted to get out of the
way and… it’s still my fault but I missed my braking point and it put me off,” recounted Hill of his wild slide through the Clervaux gravel. “We took two left tyres off the rim so we had no more new wets to throw at it. So we went on slicks to see if it would dry.” It didn’t.
Hill put Cook under massive pressure at the start of the opening race as the track dried out – “Me and Josh did some tandem drifting,” laughed Hill – before the BTC machine pulled out a small gap. Hill closed again towards the end, “but I was just a little bit too far behind in the middle of the race” to catch up.
One Honda that did catch up Cook was the Team Dynamics version of Matt Neal in race two. The tall veteran was seventh in the opener, but demoted Hill for second with six laps remaining in the sequel. Now Cook, struggling on 60kg of ballast, was in his sights, and Neal slashed the gap. It came to a head at Sunny on the final lap. Neal saw a gap: “He didn’t cut me off, and as I was committed he went for the apex.” Cook was pushed wide, magnificently held the slide, but Neal had scampered through for his ill-gotten gains, only for a time penalty for the move to demote him to second.
“Credit to Matt – he put his hands up,” said Cook, who had spoken in the immediate aftermath of being “mugged” of the win. “We’ve turned a corner; the team’s been working really hard,” he added of his breakthrough to top form. Of the first win, he said:
“In damp conditions, leading the way is always tough. You don’t know how much speed to carry into corners, and on top of that we had a really lairy set-up, so I was pleased to bring it home.”
A broken front rollbar consigned Cook to eighth in the reversedgrid finale, but this was a great day for BTC, with Tom Chilton adding a third in the last race to his pair of sixths from earlier. “There’s been a massive growth in performance this weekend,” approved team
boss Bert Taylor. “Josh was awesome, absolutely awesome.”
That final race went to Ingram, a marked contrast to the gloom that had enveloped Speedworks Motorsport 24 hours earlier. A broken right-front wishbone, possibly from riding the chicane kerbs, was the culprit for failing the post-qualifying rideheight test. Ingram then played it softly for 13th in the opening race, and used that as the launching pad to burst through to fourth in the next one, the car sporting damage from hitting a tyre stack. On a normal Ingram day that would likely have caused a race-ending wound, but the prevailing winds of fortune had completed a U-turn from Saturday.
That continued into the finale, where he beat the Dynamics Honda of front-row starter Cammish away from the grid, pulled off a wonderful move on polesitter Chilton at the Jim Clark Esses to lead, and then hit trouble. “I had a huge vibration from lap four on the right-front,” said Ingram. “Before that the car felt insane, absolutely phenomenal, but after the safety car [called due to an enormous barrel-roll for Thompson at the Jim Clark Esses, from which he emerged under his own steam] I picked up something, whether that was damage or a cut to the tyre I don’t know. I was convinced I wasn’t going to finish.”
Luckily for Ingram, Cammish took until five and a half laps from home to pass Chilton. “I was stuck behind him for too long,” related Cammish, “but once we cleared him, God we were fast.
I’m disappointed not to get the win, because it was in us.”
This was a comeback for Cammish too. A differential problem at the end of FP1 preceded a change of the entire subframe, setting the Civic back for FP2. Then he set a blistering time – fastest of all in the session – in qualifying, only for that to be deleted for track limits, and his next best was good for a dismal 14th on the grid. “I was just getting a feel for it, and then the intercooler pipe came off, and it took us a while to trace it,” he said. “By that time, after the red flags I only had one lap and that was taken off me. It was a massive kick in the teeth – I was only a couple of feet over on track limits. I could have lifted and it would only have cost me a tenth.” The other problem, repeated throughout the field, was the high-grip Croft surface. Incredibly, lap times in soggy conditions were only five seconds off a dry pace, but the knock-on was that the wet-weather tyres had a tiny window of peak performance. “The drop-off is
“There’s been a massive growth in performance and Josh was awesome, absolutely awesome”
massive and the track got greasy,” continued Cammish.
Still, 10th in race one and fifth in the follow-up prior to his end-of-day runner-up spot have put Cammish just seven points adrift of championship leader Sutton, and he’s now five ahead of Turkington after what was a weekend of wasted opportunities for the rear-wheel-drive elite.
Sutton, lugging the full 60kg of success ballast on the Infiniti, was in the frame in free practice, and was on a qualifying flier when the sister LTR Infiniti of Aiden Moffat went off at Clervaux, causing a red flag. “Ash’s lap was good enough for pole by two tenths, but he crossed the line 12 seconds after the red flags,” grimaced his engineer Toni Carrozza, who then explained that it was this that caused his charge to get rattled and cause another red flag by shunting at the same spot on his first flying lap after the session restarted. “It was an instant lock of the brakes – I couldn’t do anything to stop it,” confessed Sutton.
Sutton’s previous lap time should still have put him on the front row, but it was deleted for causing the red flag. And there was an earlier flier that was quick enough for pole, but that was scratched for track limits. Somehow, his third fastest lap still placed him sixth on the grid. And it all meant that BMW pilots Turkington and Tom Oliphant, despite setting the ninth and 10th fastest times, filled the second row. “It was one of those sessions I could have been on pole or I could have been 15th,” sighed Turkington. “It was about getting a lap in when it was quickest, and I think mine was when it was wettest.”
In traditional Turkington fashion, he pursued the Hondas of
Cook and Hill in the opening race until he found he was overdriving and settled for third; in traditional Sutton fashion, he got stuck in immediately to rise to fourth, then got inadvertently punted into a spin down to 14th by Butcher, screamed through to finish fifth, and got handed fourth when Butcher was given a penalty for the move.
In most untraditional Turkington fashion, he crashed at Clervaux on the opening lap of the following race: “I was tucked up behind Jake Hill, and by the time I saw his brake lights come on and I reacted it was too late. It just locked the right-front and there was no way back from there.” Remarkably, Sutton levelled the score when his patented late dive at the hairpin failed to come off as he tried it on Hill. The front-right tyre was damaged, and that sent him off track at the chicane. “Down the Honda there’s a sharp edge for the exhaust shroud, and there’s a sharp cut in Ash’s tyre,” explained Carrozza.
Sutton then went on another mission in the finale, sledgehammering his way up the pack from 20th on the grid to fifth, and almost pipping Neal to fourth. By contrast, Turkington was out of contention again, sustaining a broken left-front toelink from contact with the Ford of Ollie Jackson as they jostled between Clervaux and Hawthorn on the opening lap. “I had a good overlap, but Ollie was avoiding an incident on his left and he swerved right and probably hadn’t seen me there,” said Turkington, who rejoined four laps down after a pitstop. “At least the boys got the car fixed and we got a point for fastest lap. But you know when a day’s going your way or when it’s not going your way…”
Philosophical stuff, but not quite true at Croft last weekend. No one knew from minute to minute how this one would pan out.