The BTCC’s first American driver in 40 years is looking forward to his first race tomorrow, despite a disappointing qualifying where he qualified in 20th place in the Team HARD Honda Civic.
Holland’s best time of 2:01.112 was enough to put him in 20th place on the grid, 3.5 seconds down on the pole position time of Frank Wrathall for his first of two scheduled meetings in this year’s BTCC.
“I’m disappointed because I’d like to be further up,” said Holland to TouringCarTimes. “Our target was the Ford Focuses, the S2000 cars, and we’re about a second and a half off of their pace. It’s not terrible, but it’s getting a feel for the car and the set-up. The car’s very sensitive to almost every change we made to it today, so every time we went out I had to re-learn the car, so the more experience I get the better I will be able to drive.”
“The brakes were the big thing, I didn’t really understand until almost the end of qualifying how deep you can go on those brakes. I’ve been used to ABS for a long time and these give a completely different feel, you almost can’t lock them up which was a big surprise to me.”
Holland however is happy with his consistency at the Snetterton 300 circuit, where he’s only had one test in the wet before this weekend, and is hoping to be able to move up the order come race day.
“The good thing we can take away from all of this is that we were running consistent lap times,” he said. “I think we’ve got the pace overall for the race so I think if we can just continue that, we can work our way up the grid tomorrow.”
“To take the start of a BTCC race is going to be awesome , so I’m looking forward to that. A little disappointed about qualifying, but I think we’ll make up for that in the race.”
