Colin Turkington admits that he is ‘having to work really hard’ to keep his ballast-free Subaru at the sharp end of the British Touring Car Championship grid, after putting his car on the front row for race one at Snetterton.
Turkington, who had taken both of the previous two pole positions, missed out on pole by a mere 0.015 seconds to Honda’s Gordon Shedden, who was running similarly light to the Subaru driver.
Whilst Turkington continued to lead the Team BMR quartet, he admits that he is having to work hard to deliver such results, adding that he feels he is having to work harder to also make up for the lack of straight-line speed.
“It’s always hard to know throughout Saturday who’s getting tows and things, but certainly top speed is not our strength,” said Turkington to TouringCars.Net. “My car has been good in sector two – our chassis is working well there, but we are straight-line speed limited, so we’ll see what tomorrow brings.
“On the whole I’m pleased to be second, but I’m still having to work really hard to do the lap. The car’s not pinned down, so hopefully there are improvements to come, but it’s not going to be an easy race.
“We’re still working to try and make the car better, but it could have been a lot worse actually than second, so we’ve got to be happy.”
“To be second is a really good result. We’re just having to work too hard to do it – the car’s still quite difficult to drive.”
“Having no ballast is really helping the qualifying situation and as soon as we do get some ballast it’s going to really take the speed off us, because we’re just about hanging in there now with no ballast.
“We’ve still got gains to make and hopefully we’ll keep qualifying well. As long as I remain outside the top ten [in the championship] then we should have decent speed in qualifying [later in the year].
“Obviously I’d rather have the points in the bag – 62 is still a long way to come back from – but if we can have a good day tomorrow then we can actually build from there.”
With Turkington having tasted success at Snetterton in 2015, taking two wins in Volkswagen machinery, he admits that the change in car for 2016 has resulted in the circuit being one which is theoretically not as well suited to the team.
“Tracks like Oulton Park and Croft are our sort of territory, with slow to medium speed corners, and we can benefit from the chassis and good traction and things like that. Places like Knockhill could also potentially be good, so we knew this was never going to be one of our best tracks.”