It was a tough home round of the Volkswagen Racing Cup for Laura Tillett last weekend, with a start line incident in race two.
Going into the weekend full of confidence, Tillett showed that she was competitive with an 18th place finish in race one, before race two ended before the first corner for the Sittingbourne race ace.
Lining-up on the ninth row of the grid, Laura made a good initial getaway but as she started to accelerate through the gears on the run towards Paddock Hill Bend contact from the car of guest driver, and British Touring Car Championship regular, Aiden Moffat pitched her into the barriers.
First pushing Laura’s SlideSports machine into another car on her right-hand side, both made heavy contact with the barriers near the exit of the pitlane, triggering something of a chain reaction in which several cars were caught-up.
Resulting in the obvious appearance of the red flags, Laura’s race was run with her car stranded in the middle of the track and with hefty damage. Most importantly, though, the Kent racer was able to walk away uninjured.
Giving her reaction after the race weekend, Laura said: “I’m a bit bruised but fine really. We really haven’t had much luck at all over the last few rounds and what happened in race two was even more disappointing with it being my home race meeting, I was really confident of a strong race.
“The initial start was just as normal, everyone was in a straight line, but then [Aiden] Moffat came from nowhere, went for a gap and just hit me on the left side and that pushed me right into someone else, then into the barriers really hard. The car has got quite a bit of damage, two side impacts, the front corner and I was also hit from behind as well afterwards – it’s so disappointing.”
Qualifying 20th fastest for race one, within little more than a second of the top 12, Laura was edged back a place on the first lap but climbed back into the top 20 on the second tour. Remaining there until the end of lap five, when Simon Tomlinson moved ahead over the line, Laura then managed to break into 19th position on lap six after dramas for Simon Andrews and Graham Ewing.
With Andrews’ VW Golf requiring recovery, the deployment of the Safety Car followed and it remained on track for three laps. With the time limit almost reached, racing got back underway for a final lap shoot-out on the 11th tour and after making a clean restart Laura was able to move into 18th position when Moffat dropped down the order.
Giving her thoughts on race one, she added: “Race one was quite good, it was really close and there was a lot of overtaking, swapping places, and we were quite competitive. I didn’t get to experience the GP track in the car until qualifying as practice on Friday was on the Indy Circuit, so without many laps it wasn’t easy to get the car how we wanted it.
“I needed a lot more oversteer, the first race wasn’t too bad but I still wanted some more oversteer which we’d done for race two – I didn’t have chance to see what we could do though! It’s obviously not the way we wanted the weekend to turn out, we’ve got to get the break we deserve soon.”
Laura’s season will resume three weeks from now, on 22nd/23rd August, at Snetterton 300 Circuit in East Anglia.
Images courtesy of Jakob Ebery