Jack Goff aiming for silverware on his first BMW weekend

Jack Goff is hoping to visit the podium on his first weekend with West Surrey Racing after a tough qualifying almost saw him start near the back of the grid.

Goff left it late to put in a true qualifying time, by which time the track was beginning to get quite damp and with 15 minutes to go appeared to be heading for somewhere around 25th on the grid for the first race.

Luckily for the BMW brand ambassador, the track began to pick up speed again and was able to claw his way back up to eighth by the time the chequered flag dropped.

“We hadn’t put a lap on the board until fifteen minutes to go, then when we went out it started to rain so realistically coming back from 31st to 8th was a good effort,” said Goff to TouringCarTimes. “We only had one run on the tyres so we’re in pretty good shape for tomorrow. It kind of helps us for tomorrow that we only had one run out there and it was raining at the same time. I think we could probably have got a few more tenths and got to where Sam was and that sort of area, whether we could’ve got further I don’t know, but we could’ve got similar to Sam.”

With Goff moving to West Surrey Racing this year comes a switch to rear-wheel-drive machinery, and a potential advantage when getting off the line at the start of a race, something Goff admits could go either way.

“I’ve done two practice starts,” said Goff. “One good, one bad so we’ve got a 50/50 chance! I think we’ll be OK. The starts in a RWD car are better, yes they’ve been pegged back a bit but the physics say they should be better so even if I do get a bad start it’ll still be pretty decent.

I’d like to get a podium, come away from my first weekend in a RWD with a podium, that’ll be fantastic but we’ll play it by ear, one step at a time. Get through turn one, race one, then the race two grid has changed [back to the race one result determining the grid] and that should suit us with RWD we should pick off some people later in the race. If you ask me later tomorrow, we should have a better idea of where we stand.”