New engineer for Colin Turkington

Colin Turkington will be working with a new engineer during the 2009 British Touring Car Championship season. Team RAC has attracted top engineer John Morton to take up a new role within the team.

John Morton has previously worked for the title-winning team VX Racing and last year he was responsible for setting up Mat Jackson’s BMW, who consequently finished scond in the final standings.

Morton will replace Geoff Kingston at Team RAC. Kingston has moved to Arena Motorsport where he will be preparing the new Ford Focus.

Dick Bennetts, team principal at Team RAC, told the official BTCC website: “We’re very pleased to have John on board. We’re getting someone with experience of working within a title-winning team and who last year obviously had a great touch when it came to making the Jackson BMW work.”

“Bring all that to our BMW, and with a proven quantity such as Colin driving, and we should be very competitive from the start of the season.”

John Morton started his new job at a test at Thruxton last friday. The test helped Turkington and Jelley to try a couple of new things on the car. “It was a late call to do the Thruxton test, so we only ran one car – our third car (the new one) as the two others are still being rebuilt”, Bennetts said.

“We missed the first session due to a misfire, which was rectified for the second session. Both Colin and Stephen shared the car, so didn’t have a lot of time each in the car.”

“However, we tried a different set-up which appears to have some potential. Lap times were good, but also with a lot of traffic, so it was difficult to gauge 100 per cent where we were.”

Albert Lau will remain in charge of Jelley’s car within the RAC camp.