Rob Collard said second place in the third British Touring Car Championship race at Silverstone was just reward for his West Surrey Racing team’s effort.
Collard started from second and beat polesitter James Cole off the line to take the lead, only to be caught and passed by former team-mate Colin Turkington a lap later, the Northern Irishman going on to win the race.
But despite being unable to respond to Turkington’s pace, Collard was delighted with the result – with team-mate Sam Tordoff completing the podium – at a circuit where his BMW had been expected to struggle.
“We worked hard today,” he told TouringCars.Net. “I didn’t qualify quite as well as I wanted to yesterday so I was up against it a bit. Race one was what I felt was a really good solid race – to me that was the performance of the day.
“Race two, we struggled a little bit with the soft tyre which I was quite surprised at – but it brought us home ninth and that put us in the reverse grid.
“I knew I had it all to do on lap one – I got the lead but I just couldn’t hold Colin back and he just caught me knapping before my tyres were warm under braking at Brooklands and he barged his way through and I knew it was game over.”
The 46 year-old nevertheless felt that he had the capacity to win, had he been able to break away in the early stages.
“If I could have got a couple more laps under my belt I think we’d then more or less have been able to control the race. But I didn’t – I got away the first lap and then Colin got past Cole and he was on me.
“I was that bit cautious into Brooklands and he came – with a front-wheel drive car under braking in the first couple of laps into those corners you just can’t [hold him off]. It was a shame because if I’d been able to get away it could have been a different result.”
While expressing his delight at his result, Collard admitted that the haul of points that WSR managed owed much to its maximisation of its cars’ performance, rather than outright pace.
“Trust me, we haven’t got the pace,” he said. “We’ve done a really rock-solid job this weekend and I think a few others have dropped the ball because we shouldn’t be where we are. The amount of power that they’ve got on this sort of circuit – we shouldn’t see them for dust.”
Collard and Tordoff briefly exchanged blows during the race, with the pair swapping positions twice before the end.
But Collard explained that after his team-mate had tried an initial pass, they had arranged an agreement to give Tordoff a chance to pull away.
“It’s easy to slipstream on to the back of somebody here and when we haven’t got the power, I can’t get away. Sam kept saying on the radio ‘I’m catching’, but he was only catching me on the back straight under braking – with the slipstream.
“I said on the radio ‘if he thinks he can get by, I’ll let him by but if he can’t pull away I want the place back’ because we’re effectively still fighting for points.
“I moved over and let him through, and he had five laps of pushing his hardest to try and get away and he couldn’t break away from me so we reversed it on the last lap which was nice that he kept his side of the deal.”