Rob Collard – “You may as well come 20th as come 11th!” - 19/04/04

Starting the new season at his local track, defending BTCC Independents Cup Champion Rob Collard was hoping for a more successful meeting at Thruxton than in 2003. His challenge for the title came very close to being ended after a huge high-speed shunt that wrecked much of his privately owned Vauxhall Astra Coupé.

Having been in talks with manufacturers over the winter about possible works drives, the decision to defend his Independents crown came relatively late in the day for Collard and as a result, the car that took to the track at Thruxton had changed little since its last race at Oulton Park last year.

Struggling throughout practice and qualifying, Collard and his team – led this year by Edenbridge Racing boss, Peter Briggs – had to be content with 13th spot on the grid for the opening race of the season. With the new for 2004 reverse grid system, that sees the top 10 finishers from race one reversed to from the grid for race two, the potential was there to turn things around for the second race of the day.

However with the new system comes a 10-place discrepancy on the race two grid between the 10th and 11th placed finishers. That inevitably means that for every ecstatic polesitter this year, there will be a not so happy loser. The first driver of the year to experience this disappointment was Collard.

“You may as well come 20th as come 11th!”, he said. “I was so gutted because we felt that we would scrap the first race after the bad qualifying session, come in 8th or 9th, or maybe even 10th. I went for it at the start of the race but I just didn’t have the pace. I was battling away and they’re telling me on the radio that I’m tenth and I’m trying to hold Chilton off but I could see he was getting frustrated and I thought ‘in a minute he’s going to take me off’, so I didn’t quite let him through, but I didn’t resist when he made a move on me.”

On Tom Chilton, Collard continued “In all fairness he didn’t really barge me off the track like he has with some of the other cars this weekend. So far as I’m concerned he drove reasonably well. If he slowed down and actually thought about his overtaking manoeuvres, he’s got the machinery to do it and he should be able to overtake me quite easily. But he hasn’t quite got the maturity yet to do a good job. He is very quick when he’s out on his own but he could have overtaken quite a lot of cars quite easily but he kept outbraking himself in to the chicane and that is just concentration. Whether it’s nerves or immaturity, I don’t know but he’s just lacking concentration. He made a real hash of the start in the second race and he was on pole there!”

Whilst race pace proved a problem for the Collard Racing team, Rob was reasonably content when looking back on the weekend as a whole: “As an overall it was a good meeting really. We’ve scored points, we’ve had no damage. I was concerned that Matt Neal was just going to walk away in the championship standings but he hasn’t done so.”

“We struggled all weekend with pace and it’s really frustrating because we’re normally very quick here. At the moment we are really struggling. We’ve changed absolutely everything you can think of on the car and it just hasn’t made it any better. We sort of hung in there in the second race, stayed out of trouble and battled through and that was quite a good finish, and we actually had quite good pace there.”

Collard will be hoping for an improved performance at Brands Hatch, in an effort to take the challenge to the leaders. He will be boosted by the return of his number one mechanic who missed the opening rounds due to other commitments. “I’ll be very glad when he’s back and we can strip the car apart and completely rebuild it. I feel then that when we go to Brands Hatch, the car will be in a lot better shape.”

Photography: Peter Still (www.stillphotography.co.uk)