Rob Collard was left disappointed after qualifying in 18th for the first British Touring Car Championship race at Knockhill, citing the wrong set-up direction as the main reason.
Collard, the current championship leader, had to take to the circuit with the maximum 75 kg of ballast on board for the session. But the BMW racer insisted that was not the only reason for his lack of pace, as he also blamed a disallowed lap time and a poor set-up on his car for his lowly grid position.
“It’s very disappointing to be 18th,” said Collard to TouringCars.Net. “My fastest lap was disallowed and just about every car out there on the grid is exceeding track limits in different areas, so to be pinged I feel a bit frustrated.
“Between me and my engineer we seem to have gone in the wrong direction yet again today and I’m questioning our sanity as to why we continue to go in the opposite direction to some of the other cars.
“We’ve gone down a different route on the car [to team-mates] and I’m not saying that’s the only reason why we’re not quick, because we should have been faster, but between that and me not doing a good job in qualifying we are where we are. We’re going to have to just pick the bones out of it.
“We’ll be having a very lengthy debrief, and we’ll modify the car ahead of race one and hopefully on new tyres it will be better.”
Collard has only once qualified in the top ten during the current season, and so he has become accustomed to having to overtake his rivals in the opening race, something which he doesn’t believe will present a significant hurdle in the first encounter.
“I think there’s some good overtaking positions here – there’s some good overtaking manoeuvres up into Clark, down into the hairpin and also into Turn One, so we’ll definitely be putting some moves on the opposition to try and make our way up the grid.
“We’ve got to dig deep, get through race one as best as we can and concentrate on races two and three.
“We’ve got a box of bits here that we’ve got to make the best of, and we didn’t, so I’m sure that come the races we’ll be pretty much sorted and we’ll be back in the group.”