Dan Cammish: ‘Five more laps in race two and I’d have been long gone’

Dan Cammish believes he could have won the second British Touring Car Championship race at Brands Hatch if he had had another lap to challenge Josh Cook for the win.

NAPA Racing’s Cammish followed up his third-place finish in race one with another podium in race two, the Ford Focus driver putting in increasingly fast laps as the end of the race approached.

Cammish had been running in third with just two laps left to go, but that then became second after Jake Hill spun out ahead of him on the road.

Then, on the last lap, he heaped substantial pressure on eventual winner Josh Cook for the lead, but ran out of time to find a way past.

“When you push the guy over the line and you’re coming at speed, you can’t help but think ‘what I’d do for another couple of laps’,” Cammish told TouringCars.Net.

“The guys have given me a great car. Clearly you can see up and down the pitlane differences in setup; some have it a bit more when the track is a bit wetter, but mine seems to come to me quite dramatically as it dries up.

“One more lap and I think I’d have had a go. Five more laps and I think I’d have been long gone in the distance.

“My car was just fantastic by the end whereas I think he [Cook] has had the best of his. But at the end of the day you only win it by an inch, don’t you?

“I think whatever setup Josh is using it clearly works in the beginning of the race. But by the last few laps he was really hanging on to it and didn’t have any front-end grip left.

“Ours is the opposite – we’re making do for half a race and then it switches on and we motor.”

Cammish admitted to having had some teething issues deploying his hybrid ever lap, which saw him locked out from using it several times and he thus finished the race without having maximised its deployment.

“It locked me out for a good few laps in the middle, so it was still saying I had a few laps left but when I was pressing it I was denied. I wondered if maybe I had used it all.

“I’d press it – I could still see it said four to go – and then on the last two laps it gave me it back again.”

The 33-year-old admitted there was lots of discussion to be had internally within the team as to why, compared to Donington Park where the Fords struggled in the races, the race pace had dramatically improved in this weekend’s trio of races at Brands Hatch.

“Yesterday we struggled – we were eighth and 18^th. I had a bit of hybrid and Ash [Sutton] didn’t and I’ve no doubt that with some hybrid he would probably have qualified somewhere around where I was, although I don’t think much more.

“Our debriefs are lasting longer than ever as we’re trying to understand what package we have and how to make it better.

“It is interesting and I think the debriefs are only going to get longer as to why suddenly we have a car that can actually sustain [race pace].

“Our dry pace understanding at the moment should be that, if anything, we use the front tyre harder and we should be falling away quicker than anyone else, but we’re not, we’re getting only better.

“We’ve got a lot of questions to ask, and the guys I’m sure will be scratching their heads more now than they have been.”