Josh Cook wasn’t getting carried away with scoring his first double win of the British Touring Car Championship season at Brands Hatch, with the BTC Racing driver saying his focus is on the overall championship.
Cook won the opening race after picking off the leading BMWs in wet but drying conditions, notching up his first win of 2022.
He then repeated the win in race two, scoring the 15th win of his BTCC career, despite coming under pressure from both Jake Hill and Dan Cammish late in the race.
Cook then capped off his weekend with a solid eighth place in the final race, having started from 12th after the maximum number of positions were reversed for the grid of the finale.
Despite coming under sustained pressure in race two, Cook felt he always had the edge to hold on to the win.
“I didn’t quite have the same balance that I had in race one – although it was damp it was a different sort of grip level and our balance fell away a little bit – but you’ve just got to get on and drive it,” said Cook to TouringCars.Net after race two.
“I had to cover in some places. We were quite strong in sector one but struggling in the final part of the lap. I just had to not give Jake any opportunity.
“I think I would have been able to continue to just about hold him off because of the strength in our car in different areas to his.
“For me, the wins do mean a lot, but the main thing is we’re here for the championship.”
Last season, Cook won five races, with three of them coming at Thruxton, the venue for the next round of the championship.
Indeed, seven of his 15 victories have come at his home circuit, but despite that Cook is not getting carried away with his run of form, which sees him move up to second overall in the drivers’ standings, eight points behind leader Tom Ingram.
“The most important thing for me is that we keep ticking off the points scores, keep building that tally up.
“We can’t play the game of sacrificing points to keep decent hybrid amounts moving to different circuits because we don’t know how ‘big’ the hybrid will be at different circuits – we don’t know how much it gains us.
“You just never have that opportunity [to play games] in the touring car championship, you’ve just got to score as many points as you can every single time you can.”