Collard hopes to bounce back from qualifying

Rob Collard says “we can’t win the qualifying war”, with the BMW teams focusing on race set-up to beat the Chevrolet and turbo-engined cars.

“You don’t win a race by qualifying well,” said Rob Collard to TouringCarTimes.

“We’ve done a race run and the car was very consistent, and that’s what we’re focusing on. We know we can’t win the qualifying war at the moment, so we have to focus on the bigger picture.”

Collard believes the team has been buoyed up by West Surrey Racing’s recent performances in the World Touring Car Championship:

“We’re very enthusiastic as a team – and myself. We’ve had some bad luck and some real big knock backs this year, but I don’t feel we’re eighth in the championship because we’re slow – we’re very quick and we want to try and continue now and if we can bring some more silverware to the team like Colin (Turkington) has over the last five or six weeks we’d be very happy.”

Collard’s objective is to break into the top five in the championship

“I want to try and re-establish myself back in the top five of the championship overall, that’s where I feel we should be – and if I could do that over the next three rounds I’d be very pleased.”

After running strongly in free practice, Collard was caught out in the rain and qualified in 11th for the first race at Snetterton, with team mate Andy Neate in 15th.