Team HARD. boss Tony Gilham believes that trust in his engineering team has made a difference ‘straight out of the box,’ after he enjoyed a successful opening weekend to the 2018 British Touring Car Championship.
The Kent-based outfit revamped its Volkswagen CC’s for 2018, and underwent major changes over the winter, including its partnership with Brisky Racing.
Local driver Jake Hill scored his first ever BTCC podium with second in the middle contest, and fellow Kent racer Mike Bushell secured fifth position in the final race on his return to the series.
Gilham told TouringCars.Net he was was pleased with strong results on what was an emotional weekend for the squad, after ‘rolling the dice’ with rebuilt cars over the winter.
“There were tears at the end of race two because it has been a very long winter,” said Gilham.
“We’ve had a massive restructure in terms of staffing, and what we’ve built is pretty special.”
Gilham gave credit to the new enginners at the team, particularly new team manager Jamie Warren and former Speedworks Motorsport engineer, Geoff Kingston.
“It’s been a lot of hours, a lot of time, a lot of hard work,” explained Gilham. “So today has been emotional – they are essentially four brand new cars – there’s very little remaining from last year’s car.
“We rolled the dice a little bit with the chassis changes but we trust in our engineering team and it’s paid dividends out the box.”
Gilham was also impressed by the performance of the Volkswagen CC’s on a track which does not favour the Brands Hatch Indy layout.
“It was a decent start to the year at one of our weakest circuits. So it’s been a good weekend.
“We had a little bit of a lucky break, but it was also an educated risk to go for the slick tyre in race two so it’s nice to take that risk and for it to pay off.”
Despite admitting to a ‘lucky break’ in the middle round, Gilham praised Jake Hill’s race two performance and Mike Bushell’s fifth position in final encounter.
“It meant a lot and it was a great achievement for the whole team because like I say so much has gone into it and that’s just the icing on the cake.
“Bushell was there on merit in the last race with P5 in a battle-scarred car, which was a sensible drive.
“Unfortunately for Jake he picked up damage in race three after a coming together with Aiden [Moffat] who was trying to come back through the pack so that damaged his car on the green flag lap.
“You’d like to think that Jake would have been pushing for a podium as well so we’re there on merit, we’ve got the pace. It’s very satisfying when you put in so much work and you get the results that you want to achieve.”