James Nash expecting strong results with Ford

Reigning BTCC independents’ champion James Nash is expecting the Ford Focus to be podium contender before the year’s out, with the team still coming to grips with the new car and new circuits since switching to the WTCC for the 2012 season.

Nash was fighting on the outside of the top 12 at the second round of the Championship at Valencia, and the Ford Focus S2000 TC was just three-tenths of a second away from making it into the second part of qualifying.

“We’re making a lot of different changes to the car and engine. Every time we hit the track there’s something new on it,” said Nash to TouringCarTimes. “It doesn’t always work, but we’ve got to try all these things to try and see if they don’t work or if they do.”

The Ford Focus has been carrying an additional 30kg of ballast for the first three meetings of the year whilst the car runs with disputed front and rear suspension parts. Once these are replaced for the fourth round of the Championship at the Slovakiaring, the team will lose this weight penalty, but will already be running lighter at next weekend’s race at Morocco with the new compensation weight allocations.

“The weight will always give us time. It will always give us a different in movement in the car but it’s something a small set-up tweak in the car should handle. It’s not a vast amount, we go from nothing to 45 kilos in British Touring Cars (between races), so we can do the same here.”
With Valencia and Monza out of the way, the remainder of the rounds of this season are tracks where James Nash has never raced. Arena team-mate Tom Chilton similarly has not raced at the bulk of the tracks, with the exception of Macau, where Chilton had raced back in 2002 at the age of 17, finishing in the top eight at the tough street circuit.

“We don’t know any from now on,” said Nash. “Laser Tools have a simulator with Darren Turner, so I’ll be working with them on the simulator. And also Grahame Chilton, Tom’s father, has a company within his company, Capsim, which has a simulator. It’s a learning aid and we can’t get out there before, so it’s something we have to do.”

“Not knowing the tracks, it’s going to start getting harder, but when I did the SEAT Eurocup I didn’t know any of the tracks but the results still came; so it’s learning the car and understanding the car, at the minute that’s the biggest fundamental.”

Although not entered for the independents’ trophy because the team has some support from Ford, the outfit is primarily a private operation and not a works programme like the Chevrolet team. With manufacturers such as SEAT and Honda set to step up their involvement in 2013, the hope is Ford will follow suit and Nash is hopeful that he’ll be in a good position to join a Ford works programme next year if it happens.

“I’d like to think so far I’m putting in some hard work and…that we’d have a fair crack at it. I don’t want to spend a year doing a load of development and ending up at the end of the year without a place to be ‘cos year two will be the time it starts to happen. The idea is to be there, otherwise we’d have gone down the Bamboo route and had a year at a car that’s proven; it’s long-term not short-term.”

After first racing in the BTCC in 2009, just after a season in the SEAT León Eurocup, Nash took the independents’ title in 2011 with Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Vauxhall Vectra, a car which also won two drivers’ titles with Fabrizio Giovanardi when the team was a full manufacturer entry. After securing that title last year after a hard fight with Mat Jackson, who was a driving an Arena-built Ford Focus, Nash feels it was the right time to move on to the World Touring Car Championship.

“I thoroughly enjoyed my last season in the British Touring Cars,” said Nash. “I think this year’s going to be harder for Mr. Gow and all the teams that are there, so I’m fairly pleased I’m not there this year. It doesn’t mean in the future when it all calms down it’d be nice to go back.”

“World Touring Cars is the right place for us to be at the minute, and it’s the right place for our future to be. I’m not disappointed I’ve left, but I did really thoroughly enjoy my last season there. When you take good memories away you don’t discount ever going back. We had to work for it, it was always tough, but we went into every round thinking we’ve got a chance of qualifying in the top six, we always had an opportunity of winning, and we came away with a lot of podiums and that’s where this will be in World Touring Cars with the Ford, we’ll get there.”