Plenty of Speed but no Luck!
Saturday saw the opening shots of the 2009 British Touring Car Championship fired at Brands hatch in Kent.
Plymouth born John George was back out in only his third run of the his Cornish sponsored Honda Integra looking to make amends for a massive exit from the series at this track in September last year when George was airlifted to Maidstone hospital after one of BTCC’s most spectacular accidents ever, keeping George in hospital for 3 days before he could return to his Guernsey home.
On the day of qualifying Trevor Humphrey team manager for TH Motorsport that run the JAG Communications car said “Today made all the effort of the past 3 years worth while for me and all the boys that make up the team. We were trading places with factory run teams in all three sessions using the absolute minimum of tyres. In qualifying I told John when you do a time I am happy with and I will call you in and park the car we can’t afford to waste tyres this season, in our second attempt John posted our fasted ever time at Brands Hatch of 49.8 secs and so I called him in and sat out the last ten minutes of qualifying. The car didn’t miss a beat all day John didn’t have any problems and it worked like clock work, our budget would only pay the catering bill for some of these teams so ending up 13th on the grid was a major achievement for the team”.
Unfortunately the good luck didn’t hold up for the whole weekend and on Sunday the race day the car suffered brake pressure problems in race one, running in to an accident in race two caused a pit stop that ended that race and a clutch failure in race three saw the car cruise to a 14th place finish after dropping to the back at the start unable to pull away.
An upbeat John George had this to say “I am really pleased with the way things went I can take a bit of bad luck, we were quick enough to do some real damage in the top ten, I would rather be quick and have bad luck then be slow and need good luck to get anywhere. We have only had the car for about three weeks and it has been sitting in a workshop for 3 years doing nothing so I suppose rubber seals and the like will perish once we start using them, now we know the team will strip them out and change them. To put it in prospective we were second quickest Honda today in a car that was built in 2005 once we really get on top of the car I think we can really surprise a few people”
Date: 06/04/2009