Mechanical woes hit Motorbase at home race

Mechanical woes meant Motorbase Performance endured a frustrating first round of the British Touring Car Championship at their home circuit of Brands Hatch.

Both of the team’s Next Generation Touring Car Ford Focus ST’s suffered from a variety of issues, which limited running for both Mat Jackson and Aron Smith.

Race one set the tone for the day, when Jackson’s car collected debris from the pack and overheated, leaving him down in 20th position. Smith battled up to ninth from 14th, despite suffering with hi gear shift issues which hampered him for the remainder of the day.

In race two, Jackson charged through the field to eighth, which became seventh when Gordon Shedden’s Honda Racing Team Civic was disqualified. But a wiring issue forced Smith into early retirement.

The reverse grid draw put Jackson on pole for the final race of the day, and he got away well to maintain his lead. But an intermittent engine fault saw him drop to 10th at the flag. Smith made his way through the pack to finish 11th.

Team manager Oly Collins said: “A very disappointing weekend for the team unfortunately, especially after all of the hard work that everyone at Motorbase Performance has put in over the winter months. To get the limited results that we did is really frustrating.

“We will work heard between now and the next round to rectify the issues we’ve experienced this weekend and will come back stronger at Donington.”

Jackson said: “We’ve made a lot of different changes to the set up today and we were chasing the circuit with it being so cold. Both cars are down a different road so we’re learning twice as much data so we’ve got a lot to work with between now and the next round at Donington.

“Overall though, we’ve got a bit more of an understanding of where we are and where we need to be and feel positive that we’ve got the direction now that we need to go in to push the cars forward. We also need to iron out the reliability issues we suffered from this weekend, which we’ll do over the next few weeks.”

Smith said: “That was not the weekend we had planned for! There’s definitely more for us to learn about the car to get the most out of it but I think we kept making steps forward.

“We have a test day planned between now and Donington in two weeks’ time, which should really get us back onto the pace where we need to be.”