Bamboo Engineering remain on top in Yokohama Trophy

Independent Chevrolet team Bamboo Engineering maintain their lead in the Yokohama Trophy after a strong weekend in Hungary, with Alex MacDowall on the podium in race two and James Nash still leading the Trophy drivers’ standings.

Although there was no class victory for the team this weekend with Mehdi Bennani scoring the honours in both races,finishing second and third in both races in the independents’ class sees the team still 1-2 in the drivers’ standings as well as second in the teams’ trophy behind RML.

The team finished eighth and ninth in the first race with MacDowall leading Nash, and MacDowall went on to finish third after starting from pole position in race two, whilst Nash was able to hold on to fourth position despite having to defend against three-times champion Yvan Muller’s identical Chevrolet Cruze 1.6T.

“All the team are really happy, I always have the sights set on the podium and two of the people on the podium today were independents,” said Nash to TouringCarTimes, “but it was nice to hold off Yvan; he’s in the same car, so we had to work hard for it and got the result we wanted.”

“We just need to start off the weekend in a better stead rather than working towards the end of the weekend and then finally getting there.”

Nash was the top placed independent driver in race one before he was caught up in the second corner fracas with Tom Coronel and Tiago Monteiro. Coronel’s part in the incident which saw Monteiro knocked out wide and down the order was investigated by the stewards but it was declared a racing incident.

“(I was) behind Tom on the rolling start, and Tom got boxed in as I did and we had to lift off into Turn 1, which causes more problems as the pack closes up even more. When we were going into Turn 2 there were cars everywhere, I know I got hit but I don’t think I hit anyone in front of me, but there were cars going off left right and centre, so it was just trying to pick a hole (to go through).”

Alex MacDowall took his second podium result of the year in the #9 Bamboo Engineering Chevrolet after a slow getaway from pole position, falling behind Rob Huff’s SEAT and Mehdi Benanni’s BMW.

“It is something we need to look at again, and something we need to work on and when we get tha nailed we’ve certainly got the pace to win the race,” said MacDowall about the start.

“In that race we started ahead of (RML) and James did a good job holding Yvan off, I could see he was holding that pack up and I was hoping it could stay like that so we could have a good race.

“We’ve come away from this weekend with some good points and we’ve closed the gap to James (Nash).”