Following a tough weekend at Brands Hatch in the opening round of the BTCC, Wrotham based Airwaves Racing were hoping for better fortunes at Donington Park.

Unfortunately Donington didn’t prove to be any more lucrative for the Kent based team than Brands did in round one. They struggled to find the pace across the weekend that would close the gap to their rivals at the front of the grid.

In free practice it looked as though the issues may have been resolved as they cut it at the front end of the field with the quicker cars, however in qualifying it appeared as though the wrong set-up may have been selected as Aron Smith and Mat Jackson could only clock times that saw them in 13^th and 16^th places respectively.

Reflecting on a difficult race weekend, Team Manager Oly Collins, said: “Unfortunately we’ve suffered another bad weekend. We thought we were making some progress after testing last week, only to go backwards on Saturday after a promising start in free practice one.

“On the plus side we found a much better set up for Mat in race three and Aron’s race two set up also proved to be going in the right direction. We’ve got more information to work within the next week or so to convert it all into results at Thruxton.”

Race one saw both cars run the softer option tyre in an effort to make up several places on the grid and in the early stages it appeared that it was working as Jackson found himself up in tenth place. However the soft tyres go of after a while and that is what happened to Jackson as he dropped back to finish the race in 12^th place.

Teammate Smith by contrast managed to finish the race in 8^th place after making up five places from his grid slot, showing that tyre management is key to ensuring that the soft tyres do not go off too quickly.

Giving his reaction to a difficult weekend Irishman Smith said: “Well that was an interesting weekend! It was pretty tough, but we had great pace in free practice one and then developed a fault in the car. We fixed that for today and race two went really well. We made a small change to the car for the final race of the day which unfortunately had a negative effect.”

“We’ll be back raring to go at Thruxton and we’ve learnt a lot more about the car this weekend.”

In Race two one of the two Airwaves was far more competitive following alterations to the car set-up. Smith spent most of the race in a ding dong battle with Rob Collard and Colin Turkington in their ebay motors BMW’s, and in the closing laps he managed to get past them and take eight place. Jackson couldn’t replicate the form shown by Smith as he continued to have issues and could only finish as high as 13^th place.

The final race of the weekend was the always entertaining reverse grid race, which saw Smith drawn in third position. He was quick off the line and was challenging fellow Kent team driver Tom Onslow-Cole for second position. He managed to get passed him but couldn’t stay in second place as he was on the harder compound tyre, and with those around him on the softs, they were just that bit quicker. He did manage to hold on and finish in 7^th place.

Jackson by contrast was drawn further back and produced his best drive of the weekend, avoiding an out of control Toyota that spun back into the traffic, as miraculously no one was collected by Dave Newsham’s car. He was racing much of the time with veteran Jason Plato, and almost overtook the former champion in the closing stages but had to settle for ninth place.

Speaking after a tough race weekend, Jackson said: “What can I say? Up until race three we really struggled finding a balance in the car, everything we tried sent us the wrong way. However, we threw a totally different set up at the car for the last race and it really showed some promise. If you had told me that Jason (Plato) would have been holding me up in race three I would have laughed, we definitely had the legs on him but just couldn’t quite get past.

“We’ve at least got a direction to go in now for Thruxton.  Hopefully we can get it going well there, it’s certainly not for the lack of trying in the team.”

Liam Griffin in his Addison Lee Motorbase S2000 endured a torrid weekend which was the complete polar opposite of his opening weekend at Brands Hatch.

The weekend started promisingly in race one as he came home second in the Jack Sears Trophy and in 20^th overall, despite an engine fault hampering his Saturday qualifying. After that it got worse for him as he failed to finish races two and three.

Reflecting on a difficult weekend, Griffin said: “After a solid first race we had the ideal opportunity in races two and three to have picked up the win, especially with my two main rivals not finishing; it’s just so frustrating.

“We had the same fuel starvation fault today (Sunday) that we had in qualifying yesterday – we changed everything and it worked for race 1, then failed in race 2 so we changed it all again and it let us down again in race 3 – so this weekend really does feel like a lost opportunity.”

The Touring Cars now move onto Thruxton for round three of the season on the weekend of the May Day bank holiday.

Picture supplied by  www.pspimages.co.uk