Team BMW’s Colin Turkington secured the first piece of British Touring Car Championship ‘Silverware’ on offer at Brands Hatch as he won the Goodyear Wingfoot Award for ending the season as the series’ best qualifier.
Points are awarded across the season and added up with Colin’s eighth place on the Brands Hatch grid – rounding out a year that has featured three pole positions – meaning his qualifying results proved better than those of any other driver.
It’s the second year in a row that Colin has won the award in his WSR-designed, built and run BMW 330i M Sport and comes a day before he will fight for the BTCC Drivers’ title across the Kent circuit’s three races.
Colin, driving the second-heaviest car on the grid with 66kg success ballast, had spent the morning’s two practice sessions focusing on long runs on old tyres with an eye on Sunday.
But the four-time champion instantly found an extra burst of speed when new slicks were fitted to his BMW 3 Series in qualifying.
Aided by a crucial tow from team-mate Stephen Jelley, he qualified eighth – just 0.172 seconds away from pole position on a day when less than 0.4s separated the top 14 cars.
Tomorrow he must overturn a 32-point deficit to the series leader if he is to win the championship, but is also tasked with helping BMW win a record-breaking sixth straight Manufacturers’ title.
Stephen had been the quickest of the WSR drivers in practice and appeared likely to repeat that form into qualifying as he ran inside the top four for the first half of the 30-minute session.
The Leicester racer later sacrificed a late run of his own to help Colin’s quest to move up the grid and will start tomorrow’s opening race ninth as a result.
Tom Oliphant was the fastest of the trio in the opening session, the Leamington Spa-based racer no longer suffering from the issues he experienced at Donington following a deep dive into the BMW by the WSR team in the week between events.
Tom was another to feature in the hunt for the top positions throughout qualifying and wound up less than 0.2s away from his team-mates’ times. He will start Sunday’s opener from 14th place.
The three races that will close out the 2021 season and determine the title winners will all e shown live on ITV4 in HD tomorrow.
Colin Turkington said: “I’m super-happy with qualifying. It was never going to be easy with 66kg success ballast, but I’m pretty confident we got the most we could from the BMW. It just came alive on new tyres – just like at Donington – and I’m right in the thick of where the action’s going to be. Winning the Goodyear Wingfoot Award for the second year is a great achievement for myself and for the team. Qualifying is the ultimate test of speed so it proves that over the course of the year we’ve done the best job at extracting that speed from the car.”
Stephen Jelley said: “It’s been a good day if you look at the performance and the laptimes. The BMW felt brilliant in practice on old tyres so I had a lot of confidence for qualifying. Things went according to plan in the first half of the session and I was up in the top four, but Colin was struggling a bit at that point so the team asked if I’d give him a slipstream – which I did – and he just managed to sneak in ahead of me at the end. I pushed as hard as I could and I don’t think there was anything left in the car at the end.”
Tom Oliphant said: “I’m happy with the BMW – the work WSR did back at base since Donington has definitely sorted the issues we had – and if I’d put my best sectors together, I could have been on the second row. It’s just so tight on the timesheets; normally if you’re three tenths off pole in the BTCC it means you’re about seventh or eighth. Today I’m 14th, which is lower than I wanted to be, but I’m about a tenth of a second behind Colin and I’ll definitely aim to gain positions tomorrow as we try to tie up the Manufacturers’ title for BMW.”
Dick Bennetts, Team Principal, said: “We’ve seen a much tighter battle for pole position here than in previous years. Last year 0.4 seconds was the gap from first to sixth and the year before it was the gap from first to second. Today it’s covered the top 14. When drivers and cars are so evenly-matched, it makes it difficult to make progress – especially with the option tyre not being used here. Congratulations to Colin for winning the Goodyear Wingfoot Award and to everyone at WSR that has helped him to achieve it. He’s a class act and he’s proved that when the pressure’s really on, he can deliver. That’s why he’s a four-time champion and why he starts tomorrow’s opening race still very much in the title hunt.”
