Colin Turkington still in title contention after Silverstone charge

Team BMR’s Colin Turkington likened his charge from the back of the grid at Silverstone to the story of his BTCC season, after keeping himself in mathematical contention for a third championship title.

Turkington will head into finals weekend 37 points adrift of West Surrey Racing’s Sam Tordoff, after recovering from his grid penalty to finish eighth in the first race, and backing that up with a pair of fourths in races two and three.

The team’s Subaru Levorg GT has often been the class of the field since Oulton Park, after the very public development of the car at the first three rounds. With this in mind, the Northern Irishman has pledged to give it everything at Brands Hatch in two weeks’ time.

“We’ve been playing catch up all year so every opportunity you have to go for it,” said Turkington to TouringCarTimes. “Both Rockingham and here we’ve had to charge from the back. We’ve had a good car and people were falling off with punctures, so in the end it was probably one of my better weekends after Oulton and Croft.

“I guess theoretically I’m a contender. Coming in here I knew I had to start from the back but I kept the target the same, and that’s what I’ve got to do with Brands.

“You can never write yourself off. I could have done that coming into here, and think there’s no way I’m going to get to the front from 29th. I’ll still go there and compete hard and see what we can achieve.

“Probably in the history of things, nobody’s ever come from that far back! But I was 49 points ahead in 2014 and you never have the job done, so we will keep pushing.”

Turkington said the pace he has been able to show since the opening three round represented a significant achievement for the team.

He said: “It’s incredible to think. We scored very little in the first three meetings – I think I had 10 or 11 points and we didn’t race at all at Thruxton.

“We’ve been on a charge [since then] to get back into contention and when you get within touching distance you start to get excited. I’ll be going into Brands being realistic – I’m not going to cry if we don’t win it but I’ll be giving it my best shot.”