Mat Jackson: “Something was on our side today”

Mat Jackson was pleased with the performance of his Ford Focus at Silverstone as he dominated qualifying, taking pole with a new lap record.

The Motorbase Performance driver topped every time sheet during Saturday’s three sessions, smashing the lap record in qualifying by nearly two tenths of a second.

“It’s been a lot of hard work from the boys at Motorbase and Mountune, it’s on fire and I’m very pleased,” Jackson told TouringCarTimes. “It’d be nice to win tomorrow, clearly the car’s quick over one lap and we’re going to run the soft tyre in race one so we’ve got to wait and see. That’s a bit of an unknown, I don’t know who else is going to run that so we’ll just have to wait and see. Based on today’s performance it’s been pretty quick so hopefully we can take that in to race one tomorrow.”

While the times suggested it was an easy session for Jackson, he found himself battling with track position multiple times, weaving his way though traffic and sliding his way around the Silverstone circuit.

“The fastest lap and one of the laps before there was a lot of traffic out there,” he explained. “We benefited from the tow and managed to get out just in time so something was on our side today, it doesn’t always work like that. The car’s alive it’s moving quite a lot through Copse and Brooklands, we’re on the edge and we’re pushing as hard as we can to get the time we could get.”