Rob Collard believes he is in a ‘good position’ for Sunday’s British Touring Car Championship races at Snetterton, after the BMW driver qualified his car in the top ten for just the third time in two years.
Despite being laden with 66 kg of success ballast for being second in the drivers’ championship standings, Collard qualified his BMW 1-Series in tenth for Sunday’s first race.
It is only the second time in 2017, and the third time in two years, that Collard has been able to crack the top ten, having historically struggled with his qualifying performances.
Whilst Collard was pleased with his result, he did express some concern at being eight tenths slower than team-mate and title rival Colin Turkington.
“Starting with 66 kg [of ballast] is going to be hard work tomorrow, so the further up the better,” said Collard to TouringCars.Net. “If you’d have offered me P10 this morning then I’d have snapped your arm off.
“I am very pleased but I’m a little bit concerned that we’re quite a bit off Colin. We’ve got to really study the data and see what there is to gain.
“In FP2 we were all within half a tenth of each other and now Colin’s pulled out quite a chunk in qualifying on me. I know we are on two completely different set-ups, as we drive differently, and we’ve just got to look to see how we can improve my car to match Colin’s.
“Genuinely the car is good and I think we’re in a good position for tomorrow.”
Collard will have two other rear-wheel drive cars in front of him on the starting grid on Sunday, including team-mate Andrew Jordan, and he anticipates making progress at the beginning of the race will be a challenge.
“Snetterton is a very hard circuit because it has a narrow start straight – you don’t make many places off the grid, so having three rear-wheel drive cars around me is not going to be easy.
“It’s going to be a very interesting race one – we’ve got the weight and people like Jordan and Plato haven’t, so they naturally should be stronger at the start of the race.
“We’ve just got to try and bring the car home in the points and focus on race two and race three. If I can race into the top six or top eight in race one I’d be absolutely delighted. That, to me, would be a really good result and then we’ve got some weight off for race two.
“I’ve got Jason in front of me and I don’t know how Jason is going to play the game; I just hope he doesn’t start doing team orders and blocking us.
“P10 is a very good place to start and it’s a lot higher than some of my previous qualifying efforts. It’s going to be really hard work with 66 kg on board, but hey-ho!”