Tom Chilton confident of strong race performance

Tom Chilton says he is confident of a strong race day for Motorbase Performance after qualifying on the second row of the grid for the latest rounds of the BTCC season at Snetterton.

Chilton, who set the pace in the recent tyre test at the Norfolk circuit, was one of the drivers to take huge strides forwards in terms of lap time between practice and qualifying – improving his best time by more than a second.

That was good enough to earn Chilton fourth on the grid, but he admitted that it had been a far from straightforward day on track.

“The circuit was so much quicker than it was in testing,” he said, “and I was matching my best time on the soft tyre on mediums, which is about a second slower. It changed the way that the car handled massively and we didn’t get much of a lunch break looking over everything! We went the wrong way with something in FP2, but we put that right in qualifying and we ended up on the second row.

“I’m happy with that as we’ve had a quick car but haven’t qualified well until this point. We’ve done a lot of work to improve things and have taken a bit step forwards in terms of performance on both the soft and the medium tyre. It’s just the hard tyre where we still have work to do and I don’t really want to use them tomorrow. The car feels good, but we just aren’t fast enough on them!

“Overall thought, I’m confident that we’ll have a strong car and tomorrow is the important day as that is when we’ll score the points.”