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The Inside Track with Power Maxed Racing: Tyre woes cause problems at Croft Circuit

By Power Maxed Racing / MJP Media | 7 July 2015

We made the trip to North Yorkshire for the half-way point of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship with some worries and yet still some high hopes.

Dave has very nice memories of Croft, being the venue of his very first car racing win in the Scottish Legends Championship in 2004. This was followed by a guest appearance later the same year in the National Legends Championships when he won the final in style. His last win at the circuit was a double in the Elf Renault Clio Cup in 2010. BTCC is a different ball game and his best finish was in 2013 with P5. For Josh, Croft is somewhere that he has relatively little experience of, but he's good so no major worries for the team there.

Our worries going into the weekend were that the new tyre construction wasn't working with any existing data that we had on the car. The high hopes came from us having two great drivers and a normally very quick car. Croft has a great mix of corners with some very fast flowing corners whilst the lap is completed with a very tight and technical complex with the tightest hairpin in the UK.

In free practice, we had reasonable pace but all was not well in Dave's Chevrolet. Since replacing the front subframe after it broke at Oulton Park last time out, the steering had been incredibly heavy and it would occasionally even lock up too. After a handful of laps it was as though he had been pumping iron! Qualifying was very difficult for us with Josh 19th and Dave 20th. Since Dunlop changed the tyre construction at the last round of the championship we have gone backwards down the grid. No matter what we do to the car, the lap time remains poor.

In race 1, Josh and Dave both fought their way through the traffic to provide us with 12th and 15th respectively. The problem was that fighting in traffic affects your lap times so we were compromised for race 2. Race 2 again saw Dave going up through the field to finish in 13th but Josh was desperately unlucky after retiring on lap 2 after a mega crash into the barriers which destroyed a big part of the car and left him sore and a bit shaken.

The team worked really hard for race 3 and got both cars on the grid but once again we were embroiled in a mid-field battle once we had gained early places. Dave ended up 11th and Josh 15th. Once again the tyres refused to work for us and this is an issue.

The team with Josh are going testing during the summer break and hopefully we will find the key to unlock the speed out of these new design Dunlop tyres. We have every faith in our fast drivers and our great engineers to make a substantial difference that will be transferred to both cars and we can have a great second half to the season.

Power Maxed Racing

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