Mat Jackson leads Motorbose trio top ten qualifying

Mat Jackson led an all top ten Motorbase Performance qualifying result at Thruxton, setting the fourth fastest time ahead of Aron Smith in seventh and Liam Griffin in ninth. Jackson spoke to TouringCarTimes about the result.

Jackson was the fastest of the Motorbase trio in FP1 and FP2, finishing in ninth and seventh respectively. His team mate Aron Smith finished the first practice session in 14th and spent the second in the garage with a clutch problem. Griffin finished ahead of Smith in FP1 with the 12th fastest time and 17th fastest time in FP2.

Jackson was happy with the result: “I think the conditions all day were tricky. Obviously the NGTC cars in the rain from FP1 and FP2 looked like they were going to be very, very strong. A lot stronger than what the S2000 cars were because of the way the tyres work around the Thruxton circuit. So to come away with fourth is a great positive. It’s great for the team we got a fourth, seventh and a ninth. So everybody is happy. Obviously there were a lot of dramas that went on, which was an unusual qualifying session. Fortunately for us it played into our hands. For a change we’re on the right side of the luck.”

As to whether he was feeling confident for today the Motorbase Performance driver had the following to say to TouringCarTimes: “We’re in the right area of the grid, we’re at the front. There’s obviously going to be a lot of spray out there for race one which potentially can cause a lot of carnage. We’re definitely on the right end of the grid given the conditions that we’ve got today. We’ve just got to wait and see. Over a race distance we’re looking marginal whether we can actually make it on a set of wet tyres and that will be across all the S2000 cars versus the NGTC cars.”

“It’s going to be a very interesting race, maybe a little bit tactical. We’ve just got to have to wait and see. A lot of things can happen as we saw yesterday. We’re carrying 36kgs of ballast for second in the Championship although we’re not there, which is a bit unfortunate. So it’s even better really for where we were in qualifying. So hopefully we can send that to 45kg for race two.”