Motorbase pair target FWD honours

Motorbase pair Mat Jackson and Andrew Jordan insist they are chasing top front wheel drive honours in today’s three Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship races at Croft.

The pair were able to qualify inside the top ten for the opening race of the weekend but find themselves behind a raft of rear wheel drive cars, with two Subarus and two BMWs inside the top six.

Jackson will line up ninth on the grid after battling back from set-up issues in practice, but insisted that it was going to be hard to fight too far forwards up the grid.

“We had some issues with the set-up of the car in practice so it was hard to judge where we stood going into qualifying but the changes we made brought the car back into the window again,” he said.

“We all knew that the rear wheel drive cars would be strong round here and I think that is shown on the times with four rear wheel drive cars in the top six. Unless something goes wrong, Turkington is going to win race one and probably race two, so our aim has to be to lead the front wheel drive cars and then hopefully we can be in a position to do something in race three.”

Team-mate Jordan starts one place higher on the grid having pulled himself up the order with his final lap of the session, but admitted that the main target for race day had to be to simply score as many points as possible towards his championship challenge.

“I felt there was a bit more in it but I didn’t get the most out of the tyres when they were new; partly down to me but also because of traffic,” he said. “The car felt the best it has been but I was on the back foot a bit as I hadn’t got a good lap in going into the closing seconds, so to pull out P8 is good.

“Being honest, its hard to see anyone beating the Subaru given their pace but I feel we have a car that will be good on its tyres in the races which should play to our advantage. I think we can pick up some good points and three top six finishes would be a good end result.”