Dave Newsham and AmD Tuning disappointed with Silverstone weekend

AmD Tuning was left ruing its mistakes at Silverstone as its strong run of form came to an end at the Northamptonshire circuit.

Four of the last six races had seen Dave Newsham finish in a points scoring position, and the Inverness based driver was confident of further success having enjoyed good results at Silverstone in the past.

Despite being only nine tenths of a second off the pace in free practice, an incident early on in qualifying meant that the team’s Ford Focus ST was unable to set a time, forcing Newsham to start the opening race from the tail end of the field.

An impressive recovery drive from Newsham saw him work his way through the field, almost moving in to a points scoring position before earning a drive through penalty for exceeding the track limits, much to his dismay, dropping him back to 22nd.

A quieter, clean race followed in the second encounter, with Newsham working his way up to 17th whilst battling with understeer before the red flag brought the race to an early end.

Finally, Newsham finally got some points on the board in race three, taking 14th place after scrapping with Nick Foster and Marc Hynes, earning two valuable championship points for himself and the team.

“We’ve not been far off the pace throughout race day, so it’s disappointing that what happened in qualifying really hurt us,” he said “It also didn’t help with the drive-through penalty in race one, which I was a bit upset with as we didn’t get a warning before hand; we just got handed the penalty and told to come in.

“We made some changes to the car [before race two] but it developed understeer at Copse so we went back again in race three and things were better. The only problem was that things are so close, it was hard to make up too many places and 14th was the best we could manage. We could have taken more away from the weekend but what’s done is done and we’ll look to end with a strong showing at Brands Hatch.”

“The incident in qualifying and then the drive-through ultimately cost us this weekend,” added team boss Shaun Hollamby. “The latter was disappointing as we didn’t get a warning over track limits like others did, but these things happen and we can’t change it. We just have to put it behind us and look forwards.

“The positive thing is that the pace we showed on race day was good, even though we weren’t able to really show it in terms of the end results. We now go to Brands Hatch which will be a big weekend for us, and our focus is firmly on enjoying a strong end to the year at our home circuit.”