A power steering issue delayed our start to the weekend, and we didn’t get any track time until about 20 minutes into the first practice session. But when we did finally get out we were right on the pace and went straight into the top three. The car felt fantastic right out of the box and the good thing about that is its just fine tuning from then onwards.
Usually we wouldn’t do a new tyre run in FP2 in order to save the tyres for qualifying, however due to the nature of the Knockhill circuit, you only really have time for two runs rather than the usual three, so we went out with a new tyre run in FP2 and went to the top of the time sheets.
That filled me with confidence going into qualifying and I knew that pole was on the cards. Qualifying was incredibly close with pole position constantly switching between drivers. In the end we qualified third, which was great but strangely it was the most disappointing qualifying I’ve had all year. I genuinely felt we should have been on pole and when you look at TSL’s “ideal” lap time, had we nailed a perfect lap then we’d have been starting from the front for race one.
Looking at the weather forecast overnight I was quite concerned, as we have struggled recently with wet weather stability. Come Sunday morning and it was bloody wet, but luckily the car seemed pretty good and I was able to hold my place. I had a knock from Chris Smiley’s Honda, which allowed Colin to get around the outside of me and from then on I was a bit more cautious. The last thing you want to do when following your team-mate is to hit a puddle, lock up and take each other out.