The need for speed: analysis from Silverstone

Ahead of the season finale this weekend we take a look at the speed trap data from the penultimate round of the 2014 British Touring Car Championship season, and how they compared to the results of the day at the circuit where top speed is considered to be vital.

Heading into the weekend, those that were worried about speed had low expectations of being able to get good results. Those were namely the Honda and BMW teams, while those teams with the TOCA engine and Ford, traditionally quick at Silverstone, all were expecting to fare well.

The chart below shows the speed trap results from the qualifying session, with different colours representing the different engine builders. The majority of the field are green, using the ‘TOCA control engine’, built by Swindon Engines, the remainder use their own power units which are based on the engines that are produced by their cars’ manufacturer.

At the fastest part of the circuit, the end of the Wellington straight, the speed traps in qualifying clocked the top 28 cars all within 4.2mph. The fastest, as has often been the case all season, were the Volkswagen CCs of Team BMR, with Warren Scott and Aron Smith both setting 136.6mph, with Mat Jackson’s Ford Focus ST just 0.3mph slower.

The top Triple Eight MG car was that of Marc Hynes, the fifth fastest overall, who was 0.3mph on his team-mates Sam Tordoff and Jason Plato. It’s also worth remembering that Plato was carrying 36kg of ballast during the qualifying session, which typically hampers acceleration, but as we can see it made little effect on either his top speed, or that of championship leader Colin Turkington, who with 45kg of ballast, was still as fast through the speed trap as his two West Surrey Racing BMW team-mates.

The BMWs were joint 17th fastest through the speed traps, all setting 133.6mph. How that correlates to grid position though is quite surprising, with Colin Turkington qualifying second despite the speed deficit, Rob Collard 11th and Nick Foster 20th.

The Hondas struggled even more so that the BMWs in qualifying. The two different specifications of engine in the Eurotech Racing cars and the factory Team Dynamics cars weren’t too different, Andrew Jordan was in the joint 17th fastest group along with the BMWs, the fastest Honda at 133.6mph, with Matt Neal 133.4, Martin Depper 132.8 and 2012 champion Gordon Shedden the slowest of the competitive runners in the session at 132.3.

Dave Newsham never set a fast lap in his Ford Focus after damaging his car at the start of qualifying, and the data shows that the major weakness of the Welch Motorsport-built Proton engine is its straight-line performance.

Speed slimly correlates to overall lap performance though, although the Hondas, effectively the slowest cars thanks to the boost calculation for the weekend, couldn’t qualify any faster than 15th, the BMW 125i M of Colin Turkington was second on the grid. The Volkswagen CCs were the fastest cars in a straight line, but Aron Smith and Alain Menu would pop the cars on only the third row of the grid. Elsewhere though, the Triple Eight MGs of Jason Plato and Sam Tordoff did qualify first and third, with the fast Ford of Mat Jackson fourth.

How speeds affected the races on Sunday…

That 136.6mph figure is there again, now actually hit by seven cars, three of the Volkswagen CCs, three of the Ford Focus STs, and the MG of Marc Hynes.

Colin Turkington lept into the lead at the start, with the aid of the oft-mentioned rear-wheel drive starting advantage, but he couldn’t hold off the MG of Jason Plato for long, as it tackled the corners with 9kg less ballast, but curiously Plato had dropped top speed in the races, down to 134.4mph, exactly the same as his title rival Colin Turkington.

While the battle up front lasted just half a lap, most of the action was seen further down the field, as the poorly qualified Hondas and the Ford Focus of Fabrizio Giovanardi, which effectively was the fastest car down the Wellington straight surged forward. Surged they could, as between qualifying and the race, the Hondas had found some extra top speed overnight, with the Honda no longer 3.3mph off the pace but 1.1mph. The two Team Dynamics Hondas had been 18th and 19th fastest in the first sector in qualifying, but in race one they were the two fastest cars, with Matt Neal setting the second fastest lap of the race, only bettered by the TOCA-engined Mercedes A-Class of Adam Morgan.

As much as the reversed grid for race three usually delivers the most entertaining race, with fast cars deliberately dropped down the order, the same became true of race one, with the Motorbase Fords and Team Dynamics Hondas putting on the show for the lower points positions, while the battle up front was more processional.

The pace in race two got even hotter, with the Volkswagen CCs finding more top speed, with Aron Smith clocking the weekend’s best of 137.5mph, 0.3mph faster than his team-mate Warren Scott. While the fight between Jason Plato and Colin Turkington for first and second replicated itself from the first race, but with both drivers now even slower through the speed traps than before, Alain Menu made good use of his car’s superior top speed to work his way forward to third position, his first non-reverse podium of the season.

The Hondas continued to pick up some spots with their revised performance, while Fabrizio Giovanardi’s fast Ford worked his way forward to an important seventh, which turned out to be the winning spot in the draw for the reversed grid pole position.

In race three, Mat Jackson took his second win of the year after a hard fight with team-mate Fabrizio Giovanardi, and with Aron Smith in second in the Volkswagen CC, it seems the Ford driver didn’t need to make full use of the car’s potential, with his car now just 24th in the speed traps, 132.8mph the top speed he recorded during the race.

The third race had one of the most exciting laps of the season, with Alain Menu, Jason Plato, Fabrizio Giovanardi and Colin Turkington all getting involved as Turkington tried to pass Giovanardi’s Ford Focus while defending against Menu’s Volkswagen, and was then tapped into Giovanardi’s Focus by Plato’s MG.

The whole event was thanks in part to the difference in top speed, Turkington was unable to mount a charge out of the corners on the Ford, with the Focus having a 2.1mph top speed advantage on the straight, so it was all about setting the moves up through the corners, where the rear-wheel drive BMW would make up for all of its disadvantage in speed.

The Silverstone weekend, the second fastest circuit on the calendar, basically told the story of top speed being a necessity. The Volkswagens, Fords and MGs, all the top of the speed traps, featured all weekend. The Hondas were nowhere in qualifying, but when they found more speed on Sunday they began to feature, but too late to make a difference or to save Gordon Shedden’s championship bid, but the exception to this rule was certainly the West Surrey Racing BMWs, namely Colin Turkington, who had podium-winning pace in one of the slowest cars in a straight-line, so surely the fastest car through the corners.

This weekend thankfully for him the Brands Hatch Grand Prix circuit has a lot more of those. Unfortunately for him it also happens to be title rival Jason Plato’s best circuit, and he’ll have one of the fastest cars in the Championship on the day, but I think we’ve seen this all before?