The AmDtuning.com team returned to their West Thurrock base having failed to finish a single race during the second weekend of the 2012 British Touring Car Championship campaign at Donington Park.
After a strong opening round of the season at Brands Hatch, the team headed to the East Midlands looking to build on the double points finish secured by Ollie Jackson.
Donington Park had previously been a strong circuit for the team and the car and they arrived hopeful of continuing their strong start to the season.
Sadly for the team, the weekend started with an alternator issue and Jackson was unable to set a timed lap during the first practice session while second practice saw the Attleborough based driver encounter brake troubles and he finished with the twentieth fastest time of the session.
Despite the issues in the practice sessions, the team hoped for an upturn in form for qualifying. Jackson would up the session nineteenth due to an engine issue.
The team changed the engine in the #48 Volkswagen Golf ahead of the first race of the day and Jackson took up his nineteenth position on the grid. Having made the engine change, the mapping of the engine was out and Jackson wasn’t classified in the results after a number of visits to the pits to try to sort out the lack of pace in the car.
“We just haven’t had a chance to show what we can do this weekend,” Ollie reflected. “We’d had our issues on Saturday but the braking issue was sorted for race day and the car was handling really well; we were just down on speed because of the mapping issue.
“We didn’t expect the mapping to be out like it was and it was the right decision not to compete in the other races as we would have risked blowing the engine up and that would have put us in a difficult position ahead of Thruxton. It’s been tough, but we’ll fight back from it.”
After evaluating the issue, the team took the decision to withdraw from the rest of the weekend to avoid causing any damage to the VW Golf’s engine.
“It’s a shame as we showed good pace at Brands Hatch and we should have gone even better here,” he said. “However, it wasn’t to be. We’ve now got to sort the problems out and make sure we are up to speed at Thruxton so Ollie has a car that he can challenge with and we will go there aiming to show the kind of speed we showed last year.
“Before the season started, we had an issue with our new engine in testing which meant we were running an old one for these first two rounds and that has really led to our problems this weekend – it left us on the back foot. Having said that, we didn’t think the mapping would be so different on the replacement engine compared to the old one, so we’ll now get the car onto the rolling road and sort the mapping out so that we are ready to go in a fortnight.”