Dick Bennetts underlined his happiness at BMW’s performance on their first British Touring Car Championship meeting for 21 years as a manufacturer, despite the late delivery of their new B48 engine.
The unit, developed by BMW and West Surrey Racing’s long-term engine partners Neil Brown Engineering, was only delivered for installation on the team’s trio of BMW 125i M Sport machines with a week to go before the curtain-raiser at Brands Hatch.
The first free practice session of the season was the first time either Colin Turkington or Andrew Jordan had run with their new engine units. Collard’s underwent limited mileage on Media Day and at Snetterton the following day.
Despite the late arrival, Andrew Jordan cemented the team’s early season form with a reverse grid victory and all three WSR drivers took to the podium across the weekend.
“We didn’t get the new engine into the chassis on one car until the Media Day, then we didn’t get the other engines delivered until last Saturday – we were cutting it fine,” admitted Team Principal Dick Bennetts to TouringCars.net
“We were a bit nervous, but to be honest I’m very pleased now that all three cars finished all three races, all three drivers got a podium each and for AJ [Jordan] to get a win in his first race with us was fantastic.”
He admitted the engine posed some teething problems, but was happy overall with the reliability of the team’s first entirely-new engine since 2007.
“Reliability-wise, we’re very pleased. We’ve had a few little gremlins with the new engine, but you always get teething troubles.
“Ideally we should have had it a month ago to get on track and find these little problems. On the dynometer it’s a good engine, and we’ve often said the TOCA engine is very strong, and now I think we’ve got an engine that is similar to a TOCA engine, so that’s fairer to me.”
Bennetts also suggested Sam Tordoff’s departure to the British GT Championship may have been motivated by previous concerns their turbocharged engine was at the end of its development curve.
“I think it’s one of the reasons Sam [Tordoff] left us.
“The chassis was good, we have a good team but if you haven’t got a good engine. He complained several times saying if we put a TOCA engine in, we’d be looking good but we want to run a BMW engine.”
“The new B48 is BMW’s latest technology, with Neil Brown’s development. It was a late call, but we’re very pleased to be where we finished.”
The team now intends to identify development paths from its data before heading to the next event at Donington Park in just over a week’s time.