Adam Morgan was pleased to conclude his weekend at Thruxton with victory in the final British Touring Car Championship race, effectively repeating his 2021 performance at the Hampshire circuit.
Morgan started the partially reversed final race from the front row of the grid alongside pole man Jason Plato and immediately moved into the lead after the BTC Racing driver made an average launch.
The Ciceley Motorsport driver’s main pressure thereafter came from Team BMW’s Colin Turkington, who had quickly followed through into second, but Turkington himself couldn’t shake off NAPA Racing’s Ash Sutton in third.
The race ultimately saw Morgan having to stave off the threat of an assault from Turkington, which he did so with aplomb, despite a late-race sprinkling of rain threatening to distract Morgan’s focus.
Morgan explained to TouringCars.Net that he had saved some of his hybrid deployment for later in the race to help him to fend off an attack from Turkington that ultimately never quite materialised.
“He was pushing pretty hard, and I knew I was never going to get away from him – Colin was never going to give up,” said Morgan.
“I didn’t use hybrid for the first five laps so then I had the rest of the race to use it as a safety blanket in case anything went wrong.
“I saw Ash was also pushing, so Colin couldn’t really do anything too risky because then he would just get overtaken by Ash.
“I just had to make sure I made no mistakes, kept on the black stuff with no silly drifts or cutting the chicane like last year, and just bring it home.”
The 33-year-old was relieved to finally secure a podium finish in 2022, having noticed that he was the highest-ranked driver in the standings yet to visit the rostrum.
He was also relieved to make up for a sub-par qualifying effort on Saturday, having earlier made progress to finish in seventh and sixth in the day’s opening two races.
“I was looking at the points before and I think I was the highest points scorer without a podium, so that’s nice now to have a podium.
“The car has been quick, and I knew we had the same pace as Colin – there was no reason why we couldn’t keep him behind, so as long as I made no mistakes I was fairly comfortable.
“We struggled yesterday – we had an issue with the setup that had worked at Donington Park and Brands Hatch but we came here and put the hard tyres on and it just didn’t work yesterday.
“We struggled and we qualified out of position in P12. We should have been much higher up the grid and I believe if we had done that we could have had maybe two more podiums.
“Yesterday we made an error of judgement and we made up for it today.
“It’s been a good weekend – a good points haul. You’d look back on this weekend and think if only we’d qualified in the top five, we could have had even more points, but I’m happy with the weekend.”