Colin Turkington and West Surrey Racing are looking to improve the drive-ability of his BMW 1-series for tomorrow’s British Touring Car Championship triple-header at Croft.
The championship leader put in a strong showing to qualify on the third row in sixth alongside Tom Ingram, just under half a second adrift of pole-sitter Ash Sutton.
The 2.1 mile Yorkshire circuit has been a notoriously happy-hunting ground for rear-wheel drive machinery in recent years – including Turkington’s BMW – but the Northern Irishman also expects a difficult challenge keeping up with the BMR-run Subaru Levorg GT.
Regardless, he declared himself satisfied with his starting slot and is hopeful of improving the setup again for the three races tomorrow.
“It’s not a big conundrum, we just need to try and make it a bit easier to drive over the race distance, so that’s what we’ll work on,” explained Turkington to TouringCars.net
“It’s not easy managing the car around here, but all things considered I’m happy with sixth.
“It’s always nice to be higher [but] I think we got the most out of it today. I’d like to improve the car again for tomorrow and then I’ll be happier.”
Turkington also qualified ahead of all his title rivals except Ingram, putting him a strong position to extend his current 12-point advantage over Eurotech’s Jack Goff.
However, Turkington’s focus remains on forward progress in tomorrow’s races, rather than playing points calculations at the halfway stage of the season.
“You can’t look too far ahead, you’ve still got to consider the guys that you’re racing against. I’m not looking backwards, but trying to make progress forwards. Hopefully we can be strong over a race distance.”
He also admitted that facing the Subaru in race-trim tomorrow could prove a frustrating task, but resolved to take everything possible from the BMW’s performance in aid of the task.
“It’s going to be difficult. I can’t go four tenths quicker tomorrow than I did today, I don’t have that speed. We’ll just continue to focus on what we have, I’ll try and maximise what I can.”
The opening race of the weekend starts at 12:05 BST tomorrow [24th June].