Aron Smith repays team in rebuilt Volkswagen

Snetterton race winner Aron Smith heaped praise on his Team BMR squad after revealing he’d nearly written off his Volkswagen CC in testing, leaving them less than a day to build him a new car.

Smith notched his third win in the BTCC in Snetterton’s final race, after leading from lights to flag under immense pressure from the Motorbase Performance duo of Mat Jackson and Fabrizio Giovanardi.

But this only told half the story, as Smith suffered an enormous crash at Pembrey just over a week ago, giving his team a race against time to get him to Snetterton – while also building the two other new VWs for Warren Scott and Jack Goff.

Speaking to TouringCarTimes, Smith said: “The car was pretty much written off the Friday before we came here. They stripped it down to a bare shell, it got sent to Willie Poole, who worked on it on Saturday morning. He worked though the night, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and we got it back at half 7 on Tuesday.

“In 15 hours they built it up from a bare shell, to a car that went to shakedown on Thursday morning. And it ran faultlessly all weekend.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone this, but they’ve effectively built three new cars in 10 days, and one of them’s gone on to win. I don’t think any other team could do it.”

Smith said it was crucial to drive a smart race, to keep potentially faster cars behind him over 12 laps of the technical Snetterton 300 layout.

He said: “You just can’t drive in your mirrors, that’s the trick. You need to just block where you have to block. Don’t block everywhere, just use your head and try to gap them when you can.

“If one of them makes a mistake and you get a bit of a gap, drive a few qualifying laps to maintain that gap. Then back it off. Then you lure them into using their tyres to catch you.”

Smith eked out a small gap in the closing stages of the race, which he said was also part of the gameplan.

“With two laps to go I turned up the wick. Through Coram kills the tyres, so I thought ‘don’t push’, for the whole race, in case a quicker car gets through and is right behind you,” he said.

“So then you can give it full beans [at the end]. I didn’t want to be left with no tyres at the end of the race when I’d gapped them by two seconds for the first half, which is something I think we could have done – but there’s no point.”