John Thorne: “Regroup required before Thruxton”

John Thorne pulled out of the weekend’s races at Donington on the Saturday night of the event after qualifying 22nd. The Thorney Motorsport driver spoke to TouringCarTimes about his decision and plans going forward.

When asked about his reasoning for the withdrawal from the event Thorne had the following to say to TouringCarTimes:
“We had too much to do in it. I said before the weekend that if I can qualify in the top fifteen we’ll run it otherwise if we’re outside the fifteen I wouldn’t bother. Brands Hatch was bad enough as it was and I took it on the chin from the driving side of it. This weekend we had lots of issues in the handling of the car. We know it’s quick, we were top seven in the speed traps. Obviously the handling side of it is letting us down and we just need time on the car and time in testing. Also after the crash at Brands Hatch we had lots of custom parts we couldn’t get replaced in time so we were running a compromised car.”

As to whether he would be racing at Thruxton in two weeks time the Thorney Motorsport driver could not be sure:
“We don’t have the budget to throw at testing so we’ll try and be more sensible, regroup and see how we get on before Thruxton. Then maybe we will do the same thing at Thruxton [as we did at Donington] and regroup for Oulton Park.”

“The plan is to try and get out at Thruxton. Thruxton’s a weird circuit, for a start it’s a high speed circuit and if we have high speed handling issues I’m not sure it’s the sort of circuit we want to test on. Secondly it has different tyres and different setups. We need to collect more data and get miles in the car. We need more time in the car which is down to budget and spending our time properly.”

Thorne believes the team’s emphasis may have to shift from racing to testing:
“We’re going to have a regroup meeting and see what we can do in testing. There are a couple of tests coming up that we might try and use. Again for us it’s budget, do we spend our budget racing or testing? At the moment we’re thinking we’re better spending our money testing it rather than racing it. We’d lack the coverage side of it but how good is coverage if we’re at the back? We won’t to be at the front and if that means we have to spend more time testing it so be it.”

Thorney Motorsport had a second Vauxhall Insignia listed on the official entry list at the beginning of the season, which was expected to join the Championship from Oulton Park. When TouringCarTimes asked about the second car Thorne had the following to say:
“It’s there; it just needs to be assembled. Like all things in life assembly requires parts and parts require money. We’ve got a lot of people talking to us about wanting drive it, but in a driver’s defence would you want to drive a car that we haven’t got running right? I’m not sure I want to drive it. Every time I take it out it tries to kill me. It will get to a point in time where I’ll be driving it rather than it driving me and I think at that point in time we’ll have more interest in terms of drivers for the second car. We don’t have the money to build it, we’d have to have a driver onboard first for us to finish assembling the car but it’s a difficult market.”

“We’re not dead yet. We’re slightly more positive because now we think we’re making progress. At the end of the day with racing you need talent, skill, money and luck.”