Turkington upbeat about BMW potential

Former British Touring Car champion Colin Turkington believes the new NGTC BMW has good potential for this season.

Turkington drove the WSR-built BMW 125i M Sport he will race in 2013 for the first time at Donington Park last week.

At the only official pre-season test, the 2009 champion ended up 10th fastest, 1.3 seconds behind pacesetter Andrew Jordan’s Eurotech Honda Civic.

“I had a good feeling with the car towards the end of the day,” said Turkington, who returns to the series this year.

“We are still finding our feet with the NGTC car and we didn’t make any changes [at the test], so we know there is more to come.”

WSR’s other car was shared by Rob Collard and Nick Foster. They ended up 16th and 17th respectively.

Collard said: “We ran reliably and set a decent lap time even though conditions didn’t favour the rear-wheel-drive car when it comes to getting heat into the tyres.

“We know that we need to find some time, but it’s a new car and there is still a lot to come. We’ve just got to wait and see where we stand when we get to Brands Hatch [for the first round this weekend].”

Team boss Dick Bennetts added: “We’re starting to learn more about the NGTC BMW but we ran different set-ups on the two cars and now have a lot of data to look at to see where we need to improve and what we can change moving forwards.

“We weren’t concerned about lap times and didn’t run the new softer tyre like some of the others, so we’re happy with where we’ve ended up.

“In the future for sure we can win races, we just haven’t done enough miles yet.”

Source: http://www.iracing.com/inracingnews/other-news/touring-cars/btcc/turkington-upbeat-about-bmw-potential

Lucas di Grassi Cecil Green Keith Greene Masten Gregory Cliff Griffith