Colin Turkington enjoyed a ‘very strong weekend’ in the British Touring Car Championship at Knockhill, with the Team BMW driver opening up a championship advantage which is bigger than at any point this season.
Two second-place finishes in race one and three respectively, in addition to fourth in race two, have allowed Turkington to stretch his advantage to 43 points over Tom Ingram, particularly helped by the exclusion of Ingram and fellow rival Ash Sutton in race two.
But it was far from a straightforward weekend for the Northern Irishman, who had two penalty points put on his racing licence for contact with Stephen Jelley in race one and extremely challenging weather conditions throughout the day.
“It’s been a very strong weekend for me,” said Turkington to TouringCars.Net. “A fourth and two seconds is a really strong haul of points. We’ve had to work really hard to get those results.
“The conditions have been extremely difficult, especially in race two. We’ve just tried to play to our strengths and to be fast when I had the confidence in the car.
“I was able to move forward in races one and three, although race two was more difficult – the conditions were dictating what I could and couldn’t do.
“I’m really pleased with the pace we had in the BMW – dry or wet, we’ve been really strong all weekend.”
The final race of the day saw Turkington closing in on race leader Tom Chilton, but the WSR driver admitted that he was having to push extremely hard to catch the Motorbase driver.
“I pushed hard in that middle part of the race to try and catch Tom – I worked really hard to try and bring the gap down.
“But you realise that there only so much that you can do, and I was having to drive above myself just to try and catch him.
“Of course, I kept pushing and trying, but Tom had a very fast car too, so it was going to take a mistake from him for me to get anywhere close to him.”