Sport   Motorsport   Touring Cars

A View From The Driver's Seat: The highs and lows of touring car racing - all in 24 hours!

By Aiden Moffat / MJP Media | 17 June 2014

In just 24 hours at Oulton Park we went from a truly fantastic high to a gut wrenching low - and all of this in less than 1 lap of the picturesque Cheshire circuit!

We arrived at Oulton Park for the 4th event of the season full of hope. The car has been showing signs of pace, the team were looking good and I love this track from a driver's point of view. It is a hugely technical track, but I have had success here before and even though we were on the International circuit I felt that I could put in a good performance and continue mine and the team's development.

Saturday morning turned out to be a bit scary, not just for me, but for most of the other drivers too. A massive thunderstorm left the track under water and nobody was able to get any front end grip, particularly out of Old Hall corner where a lot of cars just went straight off in the treacherous conditions. For my part, I took things a little easy, knowing that a big crash in Free Practice 1 could easily ruin a weekend, and we got some good laps in without any undue risks.

At lunchtime, in Free Practice 2, we were able to push a bit harder and there is no doubt I was confident that we could make ground on the teams above us and hopefully open a gap over the teams behind. That was the plan for qualifying and I really focussed my mind on getting myself and the car ready for that.

Qualifying saw a slippery but drying track and I was really tested early on in the session. The team had done an awesome job on the car and I soon got into a bit of a rhythm and tried to judge the levels of grip at all of the corners to put together a good lap. In the end we managed a fantastic 19th on the grid, splitting the experienced United Autosports Toyota Avensis duo of James Cole and Glynn Geddie - our best qualifying so far.

Sunday saw us up bright and early for the pit lane walk-about and I cannot thank you all enough as I had a massive crowd waiting for me and I loved meeting you all. In some ways I couldn't wait for race 1, but as we went out on the formation lap it was apparent that something didn't feel right. As we lined up on the grid there was frantic action from the team, but we couldn't see anything obvious. The lights went out and 'bang' - we realised that the engine had let go and we limped around to pull off at the end of that first lap. I was gutted for me, the team, our sponsors and my fans. Investigations proved that a broken spark plug had fallen into the engine and caused massive damage.

So that was our day done - from my best qualifying to my worst race all in one lap in front of my sponsors and thousands of fans. Let's just say that I can't easily sum up that swing of emotion. With the engine now sorted it's on to Croft so let's see if we can carry on our improvements. I am confident of what we can achieve and hope to see you there.

Aiden #16

Touring Car content supplied by MJP Media