TURKINGTON TURNS THE SCREW
BMW 330i man keeps his cool at Brands,
Clearly, winning a title is about points collection. Colin Turkington is the maestro, and the WSR BMW 330i M Sport driver proved it again at Brands Hatch. After following Dan Cammish’s Team Dynamics Honda over the line for second in race one, he controlled race two. Climbing through to fifth while his team-mate Tom Oliphant broke his win duck in race three in a perfect sign off.
Race one
Rory Butcher had shown prodigious pace over the build-up to the Brands Hatch Grand Prix rounds to point to the fact he would be a major threat. Indeed, from his second career pole position, reaching the top of Paddock
Hill Bend in front of fellow front-row starter Cammish was the first part of the job done for the Motorbase Performance Ford Focus driver. Cammish, who lost the title on the penultimate lap of the 2019 chase with a brake failure, measured his pace behind.
“I could follow Rory closely, but it was a really hot day and I was watching the temperatures rise – I could feel the brakes going,” he explained. The Civic Type R driver backed off a fraction to get into clean air.
Indeed, Cammish was 0.8s behind and had Turkington in his mirrors when the safety car was called on lap 13 to clear up Matt Neal, who had spilled his Honda at Hawthorns after contact. At the restart, the race picture changed. Butcher felt the front-left lose its air as he headed around Paddock and was forced to pull over, handing the advantage to Cammish. “I had no warning,” said the dejected Scot. “I was comfortable and then suddenly it went. We have no idea why, and we will have to investigate.”
It gifted Cammish his second win of the campaign and allowed Turkington, who was carrying 60kg of success ballast, to consolidate second place.
Butcher’s demise promoted Ollie Jackson to third, his second career podium after his best-yet qualifying position of third in his Motorbase Ford Focus ST. He was lucky to hold on to the final rostrum slot, and Tom Ingram’s Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla was shadowing him in the latter stages and he had Tom Chilton’s BTC Racing Civic for company. After a troubled practice and qualifying left him 14th, the most impressive steps were taken by the Laser Tools Infiniti of Ash Sutton, who leapt up to sixth at the end.
Race two
Cammish knew that his start would be critical in race two as he aimed to fend off the fast-starting Turkington. He concentrated hard, but ended up fluffing his lines.
“I was determined not to get too much wheelspin and get dragged down the track,” said Cammish. “In the end, I judged it wrong and it bogged down.”
That allowed Turkington to escape, and he had Ingram in his mirrors once the Corolla man had muscled his way ahead of Jackson. Cammish hung on for what would be third when he also overtook the Ford on lap three.
The top three set off on a tight battle, with the gaps ebbing and flowing with rarely a second between them. That was until lap 16, when Cammish power steering failed. He managed to reboot the system but finished 19th.
Turkington was able then to win as he pleased as Ingram chose to protect his frontwheel-drive car over the closing stages. He said: “We simply didn’t have the pace of Colin and I didn’t want to overwork the tyres.”
Sutton had profited when Chilton’s power steering failed too to claim fifth, and then pounced on Jackson out of Surtees to cement fourth, which was third after Cammish’s woe.
The story of the race was the redemption of Butcher. From 25th on the grid, he had made up 10 places by the end of the second lap. Following a safety car to clear up the errant cars of Michael Crees (BTC Racing Honda Civic) and Bobby Thompson (Trade Price Cars Racing Audi), Butcher continued to cut a swathe through the pack to nip ahead of Jackson with four laps to go and collect an unlikely fourth position.
Turkington said that he was pleased the heat had been off in the latter stages of race two, but he made life hard for himself by drawing number 12 for the reversed grid. He would be on row six with 60kg, while Aiden Moffat (Laser Tools Racing Infiniti) and Jack Goff (Team Hard VW) would share the front row.
Race three
Moffat led race three away, with the rearwheel-drive cars of Stephen Jelley (Team Parker Racing BMW 125i M Sport) and Oliphant.
It didn’t take long for the three rear-wheeldrive men to get the gloves off. At Clearways at the end of the opening lap, Jelley looked down the inside of Moffat’s Infiniti, and a slight touch between the two served only to give Oliphant a monster run along the pitstraight, and he overtook them both by the top of Paddock Hill Bend. In the rough-andtumble of the elbows out, Jelley dropped to third Moffat to fourth. The beneficiary was Sutton, who performed a stealthy slide though the queue to second.
Butcher was also a man on the move and keen to score big, and he used great traction at the end of lap two to pick his way up to eventually make it to third place.
Oliphant was pretty fed up with the sight of Sutton in his rear-view mirror by the end of 15 laps, but he held firm for his first championship win. “Of all the people you don’t want behind you, it is Ash,” said Oliphant. “I knew I had to look after my tyres, and I was concentrating on getting the perfect exits from the corners.”
When Butcher suffered another puncture Jelley took third place. Moffat returned his best result of the season behind, but he will have been relieved to see the flag as Turkington was about to put him under pressure. As well as Butcher, there had been some major losers in the race. Ingram’s run of finishes came to a halt when he was the victim of a lap-one spill, while Cammish pulled out of what could have been a decent finish when his engine blew when he was 10th.