Winning at Donington Park
What a weekend! A second win and sitting joint third in the championship with Giovanardi. And what’s more, Airwaves BMW is top of the Indy teams’ standings.
I didn’t think Donington Park was going to be a BMW circuit to be quite honest, but we developed the car over the weekend and it turned into a bit of a killer really. We ended up having a stonking weekend.
We were quick in qualifying – I think we could have been quicker though, if we hadn’t had our times disallowed. It threw our format out for how we were going to qualify so when I did my time the track was wet – it was actually raining down at the old hairpin. I was quite pleased to be P6.
We knew going into raceday that we had good speed in the car, wet or dry. Race one was a good result. We got away and obviously the safety car hampered me a bit. It let everybody catch up again which is a shame but we just conceded the place to Matt Neal in race one and ended up coming fourth, which is good points.
Race two, I thought I was doing everything right. The safety car again sort of ruined the race. After the restart I went down into the hairpin, Matt Neal took a lunge at me, which I think was a bit uncalled for at that early stage of the race – it was more of a last lap lunge, rather than a first lap lunge. For somebody who’s leading the championship I don’t think he needs to make that sort of rash move, but he did.
What that did, was, well, Andrew Jordan tried to follow him through and Jordan just hit me so hard on the right rear and spun me right round. Luckily, I wasn’t collected by the rest of the pack. I spun round like a top and managed to keep it going and I got back going again. It was quite a challenging race, I must admit.
All credit to the team for turning the car around for race three. We did a wet setup for the car because we thought it was going to be wet, and obviously it rained. I got the car off the line really well, built up a four or five second lead in the first few laps and it just felt easy then. I just moderated the lead all the way through the race.
My tyres were quite hammered towards the end but I could have gone faster if I’d needed to. I was getting regular updates from the pits and Colin wasn’t catching me that much. I was in control of the situation. I got held up by a couple of backmarkers and the team said Colin was starting to catch me a bit, so I started to put my foot down. That was it really.
It’s fantastic for me and the team to be third and we salvaged something from a weekend that looked like it was going quite wrong after race two.
So far this year has been fabulous. We’re driving very well. I’ve got the equipment, I’ve got the team behind me and it makes me feel very special as a driver and as a person and that’s what’s helping us get the results.
