Mat Jackson second in standings after two indie wins

Mat Jackson left Brands Hatch as the independents’ points leader after two class victories, but also second in the overall championship, eight points shy of his former team-mate Jason Plato.

Jackson was delighted with the weekend’s result after uncertainty of how the car would handle in a full race distance with limited testing.

“We came into this weekend without doing a race run,” said Jackson.

“Race one was the first ever race run that we’d done, and it was tough. We sat behind Tom (Chilton), we had the pace over him but I didn’t want to risk having a tyre fail, so we just brought it back and scored points.”

“In race two we lent on them just a little bit too hard which allowed Gordon (Shedden) to come through, and the third race we made some more changes to the car and they showed. We had a good pace, not sure we quite had the pace of the Honda.”

Jackson finished fourth in race one, third in race two and second in the third round, showing steady progess throughout the day, and believes Motorbase Performance have made good progress with the ex-Arena Motorsport Ford Focus ST.

“The Ford chassis is a good chassis, Ford do develop a great chassis, Mountune and Ford have worked together for many years on the engines and do produce a cracking engine and we’re lucky to have both those weapons in our toolbox,” said Jackson.

Jackson believes that the Chevrolet Cruze of RML is still the most competitive package on the track, despite the one lap pace and straight-line speed benefits of the turbocharged S2000 cars that are running NGTC-specification engines this year.

“Chevrolet is the pace. Yes we can do one (fast) lap on the turbo cars, it delivers a lot more torque and we struggle with tyre wear. You saw in race two that Jason disappeared away from us and we fell back into the clutches of Gordon.”

“Over a race distance, the Chevy sure is the car to beat. It was there in qualifying, they were two-tenths off pole, lets not make any mistakes, they know what they’re doing and they will be on the pace.”

Mat Jackson leads the independents’ points standings with 40 points over Triple Eight Race Engineering’s James Nash on 37 and Paul O’Neill on 30. Jackson is also on 30 points in the overall standings, 8 points behind Plato and 4 points ahead of James Nash.