Pressure mounts for VX racing after Rockingham qualifying

Sat 19th September 2009 Fabrizio Giovanardi kept his HiQ MSA British Touring Car Championship title hopes on track at Rockingham today, qualifying in seventh place, seven positions ahead of Colin Turkington, his main rival for the Drivers’ Championship. Jason Plato, a long shot for the title honours, put himself back into the mix by taking pole position for the first of the three races tomorrow. Newcomer to VX Racing this season, Andrew Jordan, takes 11th place on the grid tomorrow, with Matt Neal pleased just to have taken part in the qualifying session after a heavy impact and substantial damage in a practice session accident. He starts 15th for the first race at the Corby track.

The only two practice sessions of the weekend took place ahead of the afternoon qualifying and the team used the two periods of forty minutes track time to prepare for the afternoon qualifying and for the three races tomorrow. Cool, dry conditions provided near-perfect weather for the VX Racing team and the three drivers finished comfortably within the top ten after the first of the two sessions. In the second session the drivers focused on race set up, but both Jordan and Neal ended their sessions early. Neal gave the Triple Eight crew a tough job, after locking his rear wheels at turn two and heavily damaging his car. Despite this, he finished third quickest in the session, but it was then a race against time for repairs to be completed before the qualifying session. Jordan brought his car back to the garage with suspected transmission problems, but these were quickly sorted. Giovanardi finished eighth quickest, just behind Turkington, at the end of the session.

In afternoon qualifying, Giovanardi and Jordan posted fifth and sixth fastest laps at the start of the session, while Neal’s car was still being repaired. A red flag stoppage for oil on the track delayed the proceedings for a short while, and when the session resumed Neal was ready to put in his qualifying runs. A tense session finished with Plato topping the timesheets. Giovanardi was the fastest of the three VX Racing entries, posting seventh quickest time. Jordan was 11th quickest and Neal finished 15th fastest.

Giovanardi said of his qualifying session, “Although Colin (Turkington) is behind me, Jason is on pole and that is just as much of worry – he can still win this championship, we can’t rule him out. I know what I need to do so I’m just focused on getting to the front and getting as many points as possible. We’ll take each race as it comes.”

Neal said of his practice accident, “The car was a bit on its edge, to get the time and to get the balance elsewhere I was running it so it was a bit lary into turn two and it caught me out. The guys did a great job just to get it running. When I saw the damage I thought there was no way I could get back out for qualifying, so to be actually out there competing and be in the middle of the pack is an achievement for them.” Of qualifying, he reported, “Obviously the car didn’t feel quite the same, but it’s not the end of the world and we’ll look at the data overnight and hope we can have a strong car for tomorrow.”

Jordan summed up his day, “It was a bit of an anticlimax in qualifying, as we’d been up there all day and I thought we could be top six. On my last run I thought I was on for a good time, but then just messed up in the last sector, which left me back in 11th. We’ll just have to see what we can do from there tomorrow.”