Mat Jackson back into the independents’ lead
With two class victories, as well as an overall victory in race three at Croft, Motorbase Performance’s Mat Jackson has stormed back into the lead of the BTCC independents’ trophy at the mid-way point of the season.
The Henley-in-Arden driver stormed through the field with slick front tyres in the closing stages of race one to take the independents’ class win, just 0.055 seconds down on overall race winner Matt Neal.
In race two, Rob Collard took the class win with Jackson third behind Andrew Jordan, but took advantage of the reverse grid in race three to take his and Motorbase’s third overall victory of the season, and heads into the summer’s break second in the championship behind Neal.
Jackson is now setting his sights on the overall championship as well as the independents’ trophy.
“We can definitely win it,” said Jackson.
“I think we have the credentials, both team and driver, to take the fight to Neal and Team Dynamics who run the Hondas.”
“Yes we’re an independent team but we’ve kept them this honest up to what is now the mid-way point of the season and we’ve still got lots more development to do on the car.”
“There’s no escaping they have greater resources with factory support from Honda and that they’ve been around a lot longer than us and have won it twice before but we and our sponsors, Airwaves, Moneyshop, Leyland and Redstone are the hungry ones and we’re prepared to fight to the death for it.”
Triple Eight Race Engineering’s James Nash dropped to third in the independents’ standings after a troubled weekend, though a change in set-up for race three saw the 25-year-old grab a weekend’s best result of fifth place, though with the top five finishers also independents’ entries, the points from Croft were the lowest the Milton Keynes driver has scored in a weekend all season.
“I really enjoyed the last race,” said Nash.
“Until then it had been quite a trying day with one thing or another. We changed the set-up on the car quite a lot for the third race and for the first time today we found ourselves right on it. I can’t remember where I made some of the passes I did, but having a car I could really push with was great.”
“I feel that we’ve made a bit of a breakthrough with the car today that hopefully will
serve us well for the rest of the championship. Certainly, we now know that to get the
maximum out of it we’ve got to be quite aggressive on the set-up.”
BTCC independents’ trophy standings after Croft
