Jake Hill says that victory in the final British Touring Car Championship race of the day at Donington Park was ‘the only thing I was going to accept’ after he completed his recovery from an earlier exclusion.
MB Motorsport’s Hill was arguably the fastest driver of the weekend, having earned his maiden pole position on Saturday and then fought with BMW stablemate Colin Turkington for the lead in race one.
But after the inter-team duelling cost a victory in race one, Hill was then hit with further misfortune when he was thrown out of the result entirely for his car failing the ride height check.
Starting from the back in race two, Hill made up an impressive 19 places from his grid position to finish the race in ninth – despite having fewer available laps to use his hybrid boost than many of his rivals.
Luckily for the 28-year-old, Hill benefitted from the random partial reverse grid draw, putting him back on pole position for race three.
From there, Hill drove a fine race to win, making up for his earlier misfortune and leaving him sixth in the drivers’ championship standings after the first weekend.
“It was a lot of emotions, for sure,” said Hill to TouringCars.Net. “It’s the biggest roller coaster I’ve had for a while in terms of emotions.
“You’ve got to stay calm and remember to eat, drink and do all your normal stuff and not let the bad things that have happened overcome what you do to still prepare.
“I didn’t [let it get to me] – I stayed headstrong. We had a great race two and that built my confidence back up and I realised the car was still very, very fast over a race.
“Obviously, there was a bit of luck in being drawn onto pole but honestly, I think even if we were in the top three or four, we would probably have still won the race.
“I’m very, very pleased with how this car is at the moment and hopefully it stays the same for Brands.”
Hill put some of his race two performance down to feeling aggrieved at the decision to strip him of his race one podium result.
“[The recovery drive] was also due to me being pissed off to be honest. I just got on with it. When things annoy you like that, it puts you in a different mindset and a different frame of mind to go and attack and that’s exactly what I did.
“But for sure, the car was fantastic. I didn’t have much hybrid, because I only had third-place hybrid even from the back, so it’s not like that aided me very much – it was five or six laps of deployment, so I just used it in the key areas where I was trying to get past a couple of cars in one lap.”
The BMW driver also explained that he has had a chat within WSR about the duel with Turkington in race one which potentially cost both drivers a victory.
“The other thing I’ve learnt is how to race Colin a bit better. We’ve both got to learn together not to let others past if we are to scrap in the future.
“We’ve had our chat, we’ve shaken hands, and we’re all good. We know now that in the future if we are battling for the lead then we have to wait until we’re clear of others before we start that, because it ruins it for the team.”
He concluded that only a victory would have been acceptable to him in race three once he knew he was on pole.
“Knowing how quick we were and knowing that we’d been on pole properly at the start of the day, it was the only thing I was going to accept, and it came out perfectly.”