Ashby BTCC

This was the unfortunately the very last race meeting to be held at the Ashby track and the last round of this years Schumacher BTCC championship.

Ashby has always been a tough circuit to master, but on Saturday I was quickly able to get my car feeling very consistent and easy to drive. I continued to work on my lines through the more difficult sections of the track and by the end of the day I was happy and looked forward to Sunday.

Sunday dawned much colder than Saturday but this didn’t have much of an affect on my cars performance and after round 1 of qualifying I had a safe A final position.
With this banker time in the bag I decided to push my Nosram/Orion powered Cyclone hard in the second qualifying run, a clean run gave me TQ.

Feeling that an improvement on my round two time would be difficult on second run tyres I used round three to try a pretty radical setup change on my car in order to help it stay more composed over the bumpy surface, during this round my TQ time was only bettered by team mate Elliot, so I had #2 spot on the grid for the finals.

The finals went well too, Elliot used new tyres in both finals so had a large advantage over me and pulled away, I was only challenged for a few laps for my second place by Chris Ashton until I shook him of and got on with the job in hand.
The second final was much the same as the first with no one really getting close enough to worry my second place.

With two second places in both finals I finished second overall at the meeting, a result I was very happy with.

I must thank James S for all his help over the weekend and Neil for letting me use his photos!