Tom Chilton: “We should be higher in the standings”

Tom Chilton says he is confident that Motorbase can enjoy a strong second half to the BTCC season after admitting that the team “should be a lot higher” in the championship standings.

Chilton sits eighth in the title race at the half-way stage of the campaign thanks to a single race win, with the Ford squad holding the same position in the Teams’ Championship.

The 34-year-old topped the times during this weeks two-day test at Snetterton as he completed more than 160 laps across the four sessions of on-track action and he admitted it had been a positive weeks work.

“Honestly it was one of the best tests that we’ve ever had,” he said. “We tried a lot of things that worked on the car and we’ve come away with a great handle on the car now, and its performance on the soft, medium, and hard compounds.

“We ran through lots of qualifying and race runs over the two days. Everything you need to do to make the car faster, we did. We ticked all of the boxes we needed to. We covered a lot of ground and we’re really positive heading into the second half of the season.

“The fact that both Ollie and I were fast out of the box shows that we’re dialled into the car. We’re one of the best teams on the grid, and we should be a lot higher up than 8th in the championship. With the ground we’ve covered, I’m very excited about going racing again in a couple of weeks.”

Team-mate Ollie Jackson posted the quickest time on day two of the test, which was good enough for third on the combined timesheets.

“We got through a lot of things that we wanted to try out over the two days,” he said. “We established a lot of things that were going on with the car and rolled out a few new things that we wanted to try out.

“It looked like quite a few people were pushing to beat our times, and we managed to stay stop of the board. You never know exactly what everyone is doing but looking into the detail, it looks like we’re there or thereabouts now in terms of running at the front.

“The results so far this year haven’t given justice to the pace we’ve shown. This helps to draw a line under that, and the job for the rest of the year is to get the results and to capitalise on the pace we have.”