Mat Jackson pleased with race win after mixed weekend

Mat Jackson endured a mixed weekend at Thruxton, culminating in victory in race three to move himself up to fourth in the drivers’ standings after nine races.

Jackson was one of the high profile names to suffer a major tyre failure in the first race, with his left-front tyre literally exploding and making a complete mess of the surrounding bodywork. A strong recovery drive from the Motorbase Performance driver in race to saw him claw his way back up to 8th on the grid, placing him on the front row with the reverse grid draw.

Race three seemed relatively simple for the Ford driver, leapfrogging pole-sitting Dan Welch off the line and never looking back, controlling the race and taking a comfortable victory to move himself up into fourth place in what is a very tight points table after the first three meetings.

“Obviously it didn’t start the way that it should’ve which was frustrating,” said Jackson. “But to top it off in the end with race three is a good result. It’s been a good weekend overall.

“[The tyre gave] no warning at all, it just literally exploded on the straight. Normally you’d get a vibration and know that it’s coming but on these tyres you don’t, it just lets go. It put us on the back foot, we had to push and risk a lot to come through and to get the reverse grid was good.”

Jackson’s tyre gave way on lap 10 of the scheduled 16 lap race, with a number of drivers suffering a similar fate either on the same lap or a lap later, where a puncture for Matt Neal caused an incident which resulted in the race being red flagged. Following the incidents, the organisers took the decision to shorten the remaining races in an attempt to protect the tyres from any more incidents on the unseasonably hot Thruxton circuit.

“We never get to test at Thruxton when it’s hot and tyre testing can’t be done in the temperature and clearly something needed to be done,” Jackson said. “If we had run a race for 16 laps what would’ve happened? Who knows? It’s a high abrasive circuit, high speed, something needed to be done whether it was a reduction of boost to reduce speed to reduce the amount of load put through them or reduce the race, who knows but something needed to be done.”

The championship now takes a short break before resuming at Oulton Park in June, where Jackson believes the Fords of himself and team-mate Andrew Jordan will be strong, but knows that it’s going to be a tough task due to the highly competitive nature of this season already.

“I think it will be much of the same,” Jackson said, looking ahead to Oulton Park. “The championship at the moment seems you have to finish, the people that are finishing are up there. There’s a lot of DNFs which is not good. I think for us Oulton will be strong, the chassis is in the window and we’ll have to see what happens with the boost, if it gets changed around we’ll see who gets what. That’s also going to play a part either way.”