Ollie Jackson pleased to turn a corner

Ollie Jackson said he felt that he has “cracked it” with his Motorbase-run Ford after a solid performance on track at Croft, albeit with the 35-year-old having been unable to break into the top ten for first time this season.

Jackson went into the fourth meeting of the BTCC season hoping to push towards the top ten after a troubled start to the campaign that left him with a single points finish from the first three rounds.

A strong run in qualifying saw Jackson secure a personal best eighth on the grid and he looked well set to fight for his best race result to date having fought his way into the top six early in race one.

Clipping a tyre stack at Sunny Out would damage the front left however, with a puncture caused by bodywork rubbing on a tyre leaving him stuck in the gravel at Clervaux.

Jackson would battle forwards to 20th from the back of the grid in race two despite discovering afterwards the brake bias on his car had been tampered with whilst the Focus was awaiting recovery to the paddock.

Quickly pushing into the points when race three got underway, Jackson salvaged eleventh place for his second points finish of the campaign.

“Salvaged I think is the word I’d use to describe this weekend,” he said. “Qualifying was a high-point. P8 is my best-ever BTCC result and I think we’ve cracked it with the car now. The pace is definitely there.

“I think we’ve got our heads around what we need and what our set-up tweaks are. The changes that we’ve made paid off in qualifying, and to be fair it was looking good in race 1 until I made a mistake. That kind of spoilt the weekend really. We certainly had top 5 pace, and it was a real shame that we didn’t get to capitalise on that.

“Thankfully we made our way through the pack in race 3 and picked up some nice points for the championship.”