Matt Neal leaves Thruxton joint points leader

Despite what can only be described as a trying day for the Team Dynamics Honda team, Matt Neal left Thruxton tied on points with Rob Collard, with a podium in the final race of the day effectively saving his day.

Neal suffered a puncture in the first race, resulting in an almighty crash on the start straight which brought a premature end to the race. A recovery drive in race two saw Neal take five points with 11th place, before working up to second in race three to end the day with silverware.

“It’s a case of what the day could’ve been,” Neal told TouringCarTimes. “This has always been a strong circuit for us, if Croft and Knockhill are BMW circuits then this is one of ours, but if you’re going to finish try and finish on a high, so it makes it a bit easier to swallow.”

The talking point of the weekend was the decision to drop the race distance from the scheduled 16 laps to 12 after a number of tyre failures in race one. Neal believes that the weekend could have been a different story if that decision was taken before the first race rather than between races one and two.

“It’s a shame,” he said. “I almost feel like we were the guinea pigs a bit, full race distance and there was concerns with 75kg, and if we’d have been restricted to 12 laps then we’d have had a stellar weekend. But that’s life I guess. The catalogue of events that happened after that, was just.. whatever. Trying to keep the glass half full.”

The series now takes a month break before returning in Cheshire at Oulton Park, a circuit where Neal feels will be tough when carrying the full 75kg of success ballast.

“I think Oulton’s one of the places that’s hard to carry ballast, and the grid’s close so we’re not going to be able to leave anything on the table,” he explained. “But we’ve got four weeks, we’ll worry about that when we get there. We’ve got some mending to do first.”