While plenty of attention at the start of the 2015 British Touring Car Championship season has centred on the changes at the front of the field, there’s a new man in town who’s been causing something of a stir. TouringCars.Net spoke to Josh Cook to hear about his start to life in the BTCC
Josh Cook has plenty to be smiling about right now. After taking his first steps on the property ladder with a recent move to Bristol, the 23 year-old is also proving to be one of the surprises of the season in the British Touring Car Championship, having upset the apple cart in his Power Maxed Racing Chevrolet Cruze in his first three weekends with a string of fine performances.
WATCH: Josh Cook speaks to TouringCars.Net
Those drives have, perhaps unsurprisingly, increased Cook’s fan-base substantially, with some of the 380,000 annual trackside spectators having been caught up in ‘Cookmania’.
Arriving at his team’s awning at the Bournemouth Wheels Festival, you might at first glance be forgiven for judging the 2014 Clio Cup runner-up as one to neglect his supporters, as if his dark sunglasses he sports were designed to shield him from interaction.
But in this case they are necessary; just half an hour after a deluge, Bournemouth’s skies have returned to their more typical blue, and the sheen from the team’s awning is blinding. Observing Cook, he is only too pleased to speak to passers-by, acknowledging the important role that the fans play in the sport.
“I have had a big surge [in support],” admits Cook, who spent three years racing on the BTCC’s support package in the Renault Clio Cup. “I think it’s great to have that sort of fan base – it’s the fans that keep the sport as successful as it is.”
Cook announced his intentions to race in the championship at the beginning of December of last year, when he was revealed as one of the drivers in the #RacingforHeroes academy.
The project, which was unveiled on that same day, is a joint venture between Stirling Motorsport Management and Help for Heroes, which donates 20% of its sponsorship income to the charity and has the ultimate aim of creating a team made up entirely of wounded ex-servicemen and women.
For now, though, Cook flies its flag, with the logo proudly displayed across his machine.
“The potential is very large,” he says of the project. “We’re still working towards getting the things we need to complete the season – that’s just going to be ongoing – and hopefully we can keep getting results like we have been and improving on that it should make things slightly easier.
“It’s a great project to be part of, we just need to try and make sure we can get everything together to continue.”
But while the ambition to race was evident, a deal to allow him to do so wasn’t. Cook eventually signed for Power Maxed Racing just a month before the start of the 2015 campaign, having received a helping hand from former BTCC driver Paul O’Neill.
The two-time race winner has been without a full-time drive in the championship for three and a half years now, but was more than happy to advise Cook on where to find a seat for the season.
“I’ve known Paul for a number of years through production touring cars and things like that,” says Cook. “I had a conversation with him and he pointed me in a couple of directions and gave me a bit of advice; he’d driven the car and he said it was really good and he put me in touch with Adam [Weaver, Power Maxed Racing’s Team Principal].
“Next thing I knew, we’d signed on the bit of paper and the team managed to build this car in about three weeks.
“They had bought the United Autosports licence and Toyota Avensis, stripped its bits and built this in a very short amount of time so credit to the team – the car that they’ve given me for the season seems to be really good.”
Cook and his teammate Dave Newsham’s results this season have backed that last sentiment up, with the duo recording six top-ten finishes in the opening nine rounds of the season.
Those performances have come as something of a surprise, however, with Team Principal and owner Weaver having purchased the team from Christ Stockton during the off season and expanded to a two-car operation in the space of a couple of months.
And the finishes are made all the more remarkable given the pedigree of the machine that Power Maxed Racing are campaigning; while its predecessor, the S2000 Cruze was always a stalwart at the front of the grid, the NGTC version had been frequently seen at the opposite end of the field, with a best result of 12th place – the only time the car scored points – recorded from the previous two campaigns where the car was present.
That was until this season. It took just three races for the squad to break that record, with Newsham recording a ninth-place finish in the final race of the season-opening event at Brands Hatch, while Cook has since achieved a brace of seventh- and ninth-place finishes at the following two rounds – something he had not initially expected after his late start to life in the championship.
“The first time I sat in the car was at media day. I did about five quickish laps but all the others were just installation laps to set everything up so we went into Brands Hatch a bit blind.
“We were trying to find gremlins in the car [and] there was some, we had a misfire in qualifying that Swindon sorted, and they were all things that the other teams had had time to iron out which we didn’t, so Donington was our first real stab at it.”
Cook is a modest man, and describing his and his team’s visit to Donington Park as a ‘stab’ would be underselling it by some margin.
If ninth place in the first practice session was unexpected, then sixth place in qualifying would have been beyond the team’s expectations. But such was Cook’s pace that he was left wanting more, with his eyes set on a top-three placing.
He would ultimately end the Sunday disappointed too with a pair of seventh-place finishes to his name, although in what was just his sixth race in the series Cook drew praise from plenty of observers after leading much of the third encounter, only to drop down the order after an incident with Aron Smith.
“I think we showed the pace that we’ve got with P6 [in qualifying],” he reflects. “The first race we dropped back because of the soft tyre but throughout the weekend we were just moving forward and I think race three showed that we’re pretty feisty.
“If we keep developing the car as we have been, I’m looking forward to Oulton where hopefully we can try and improve on that sixth place in qualifying and see if we can get nearer the front.”
And yet, with a mark of maturity, there is no sense that the praise received in the opening nine races of the season has gone to Cook’s head; on the contrary, he insists there is no room for complacency as he and Power Maxed Racing strive to improve.
“We know the areas that we need to improve on the car. Having had a bit more time, we can actually develop those areas that we know that we struggle in – don’t get me wrong, the car was very good out of the box, but there are still areas that we need to address.”
Despite having landed on his feet somewhat with his team, Cook also has arguably one of the most underrated drivers in the sport as a stablemate.
A two-time race winner, Newsham is one of the more traveled drivers in the paddock, having raced for six teams in five seasons in the BTCC thanks in part to a limited budget. But with that movement, Newsham has furthered his ability to feedback on and develop machines, and there is no doubt that early successes – both for the team and Cook as a rookie – owe some thanks to his experience.
“It’s great having Dave on board,” insists Cook. “He’s very experience [and] he’s a very quick driver, he helps me a lot, he really does; not just with the things that I do on the track but off it he makes sure that I’m where I need to be.
“We’ve got a really good relationship; he forgave me for taking him out at Thruxton accidentally – we were getting a bit stuck in and I just managed to clip the back of Dave – but I think we’ve got a really good thing going and I’m just looking forward to getting back to Oulton Park and seeing if the changes that we’ve made are going to translate on the circuit.”
One of the themes of Cook’s answers is a continued reference to ‘we’. But unlike a number of his peers, who misuse the pronoun to refer to themselves, Cook’s use feels much more appropriate, as though he and the team are a collective; he may drive the car, but when he does so he represents his engineer, the mechanics, his Team Principal.
There is no doubting Cook’s affable qualities. Another that appears to have resonated with his new-found supporters is his honesty – whether it be holding his hands up after his clash with Newsham, or his willingness to put his clash with Smith down as a racing incident, despite his rival having cut across his nose, costing them both a potential podium finish.
But while he recognises these, Cook insists that there are two sides to his character – the collected, measured one off the track, and the racer who takes to it.
“The anger and the hostility will only hinder myself as a driver,” he says. “I know that Aron made a silly mistake at Donington that took us both out – I’m surprised that he didn’t get penalised for keeping his foot in across the grass and rejoining because I backed off just to make sure I could rejoin safely.
“It shows that there’s a big mix of drivers out there. I’m just focused on what I’ve got to do. Whatever happens on the circuit happens and as soon as we get out that race and into the next…as soon as we’re finished that race it’s preparing for the next one – what we can do to go faster, what we need to change.
“I don’t want to make any enemies out there but at the end of the day I’m not there to make friends either.”
While Cook’s expectations coming at the start of the season might have been greatly exceeded by his results to date, his aspirations remain set incredibly high.
Cook has stepped on the podium twice this season – having been the best rookie in the previous two events – but insists he will not rest until he finds the front.
“We’re here to win,” he states, in no uncertain terms. “That’s why we’re doing it; everyone in the team wants to win races.
“Every time I get in the car, that is the goal, I won’t be happy until we are on that top step. Everybody in the team has got that same vision and I think we’ve shown that because we’ve set our standards so high – that P6 that we got and a couple of seventh-place finishes are well within the top ten which is very difficult to achieve in touring cars, but we want to be finishing higher than that.
“It’s a good base to start from, it’s a good bar to set but we’re still going to be working hard to get onto that top step.”
The stranglehold that the top teams and drivers have at the front of the British Touring Car Championship field is notoriously difficult to break; the top five drivers in the standings are all former champions, with Matt Neal currently in his 25th season in the sport, and as such finding a route to the front is (as Cook earlier conceded) no easy feat.
But having sustained a level of performance over two rounds, Cook’s speed is no flash in the pan. Maintaining that pace will be vital if he is to have any success in his quest for a race win, but should he achieve that, he’ll surely find himself with another reason to smile.