Jake Hill delighted in claiming his fourth career pole position in the British Touring Car Championship at Brands Hatch, with the reigning champion insisting he and the team had found ‘genuine pace’ since Donington Park.
With WSR having struggled in the season opener two weeks’ ago, resulting in no podium finishes for any of the four drivers, there has been much head scratching at the West Surrey team ahead of this weekend’s event.
That work appears to have paid off, as Hill stormed to pole position on Saturday, posting a new NGTC touring car qualifying lap record of 46.493 seconds, which was itself within a tenth of the all-time lap record set in the Super Touring era in 1999.
To reinforce the pace found in the team, his stable-mate Charles Rainford also qualified in second, just 0.021 seconds adrift.
Hill insists that the pace they have found, through working on the weight distribution of the BMW 3 Series, is genuine pace, and not only limited to gains found either through having more TOCA Turbo Boost, weather conditions or the track resurfacing in the second sector of the lap.
“I’m over the moon,” said Hill to TouringCars.Net. “This one means more to me than most simply because of the amount of work this team has put in to give me a car that’s capable of doing the job again.
“We left Donington a little bit down in the dumps, but only because we were lacking pace. Everyone saw it and we hadn’t done a good enough job in pre-season.
“The team has worked so, so hard over the past two weeks to try and turn it around and find a solution. We think we know what the issue is, but with the regulations it’s hard to try and achieve what we need to out of the chassis.
“It’s all to do with weight distribution and stuff like that. We got halfway there in the timeframe we had, and the car has obviously been good enough to stick it on the front row with me and Charles, so it’s been a fantastic day in the office.
“We’ve been working extremely hard in the engineering department to find a solution to our issues. Ultimately, it’s all a bit of guesswork with the weight distribution and where it needs to be.
“We have good data from last year with the car being as good as it was, but we’re 80 kg lighter and it has shifted everything. The issue is that that big battery was in the other side keeping everything nice and equal and it’s not anymore.
“The new tarmac has helped us quite a lot here, especially out of Clearways because it’s a big traction zone and that’s the BMW’s strong point – it genuinely feels like I’ve got some bite.
“Forget about the last sector, the first sector is still two or three years old and we’ve been here multiple times now on that surface, and my sector times have been way up on anything I’ve done previously in the last couple of years.
“So it is genuine pace that we have found, but mix that in with the tarmac in the last sector and its helped to give us the lap time.”
Hill also says that he expects to have to fight with Rainford for the win in Sunday’s opening race.
“Charles is out to get his first win as well. He’s new to the team and he reminds me a lot of myself when I joined West Surrey Racing back in 2022 – I got P2 here in my first year with West Surrey and he’s gone and done the same – so he’s obviously a very good driver.
“I rate him highly and it’s great to have him as a team-mate. But Charles is another competitor. Yes, he’s my team-mate, but he’s got to fight for his own stuff as well, so we’re just going to go racing and try to not take each other out!
“We need to work together to some degree at the start of the race just to get a bit of a gap, but then the race is on!”