WIX Racing with Eurotech’s Jack Goff said he was pleased with his second row starting position for the opening race of the British Touring Car Championship at Silverstone given that his lap was completed without a slipstream.
Goff lines up in fourth position behind Motorbase’s Tom Chilton, with Andrew Jordan and Matt Neal behind him on the third row.
He opted not to try to pick up a tow as he felt it cost him time during qualifying at Knockhill, and instead opted to run in clean air and was pleased with his pace.
“My lap I did without a slipstream- and there’s probably only a handful of people that did that,” Goff told TouringCars.Net.
“So I reckon there’s about a tenth of a second in the slipstream, and if you look at that spot on with a tow we would have been on pole position.
“But it can so easily flip the other way around and you can get caught up in traffic. I had that at Knockhill and I lost a tenth or so from the traffic.
“And here that could be the difference between me being P17 or being P4, so this weekend I was like right I’m going to get my head down and do my own thing and we did OK. It wasn’t perfect but we’ve been chipping away at it all day and it’s somewhere near to where we need to be.”
Although Goff was pleased with his qualifying pace, he admits that racing is a very different set of circumstances, and is wary of the rear-wheel drive threat at the start.
“Racing is pretty different isn’t it? It’s always carnage, you’ve got to keep your nose clean the first few laps,” he said.
“I’ve got a rear-wheel drive in front of me and a rear-wheel drive behind me, which is never going to be perfect going into turn one but we’ll get our elbows out and try to put on a show for our guys.”
With Goff sitting eighth in the overall drivers standings, he admits his more realistic target is the Independents championship, in which he is currently running third.
“We’re going to go for it whatever happens – we can still win the Independents – I think we’re about 30 points off of that. We can still mathematically win the championship but that would be very difficult.
“We need Colin to have about three bad races and for us to win three races so it’s pretty unlikely but we’ll still give it a good go.
“Second place in the [overall] championship is still up for grabs, P2 would be good. Top three, top Honda and if we won the Independents I’d come away pretty happy this year.”