COLIN Turkington has conceded that he needs to hit new heights in the second half of this season’s Kwik Fit British Touring Car Championship if he is to clinch a record-breaking fifth drivers’ crown.
The competition resumes at Croft Circuit on Saturday, with Free Practice One and Free Practice Two followed by the new-look 55-minute qualifying session that concludes with a six-car, 10-minute shootout to determine who starts where on the first three rows of the grid.
Turkington’s push for a plum grid position should be helped by his hybrid allocation compared to the five drivers who are ahead of him in the points’ standings, including BMW team-mate, Jake Hill.
The Portadown native will be allowed to use this extra power for up to eleven seconds on each lap and for a further six laps during Sunday’s first fifteen lap race which gets underway at 12.05pm.
By his own admission, the first half of the current campaign has failed to live up to his usual high standards; from the opening five events that have consisted of fifteen races, he has visited the top step of the podium twice in his BMW 330e M Sport saloon and the second step on one occasion.
To narrow the gap to himself and Hill – who leads 2022 champion Tom Ingram by four points – and fellow four-time BTCC title holder Ashley Sutton, Turkington needs to hit the ground running.
“I really hope I can kick on in the second half of the season,” said Turkington, who has more wins than any other person around the 2.1-mile Croft Circuit at fourteen.
“At the moment, I feel to have a super strong chance of winning there is another level we need to hit, there is another level I need to hit consistently with the car – I know that is going to be crucial for the second half of this season.
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“It is going to need to be about banging the points in every weekend because the first half of the season when the car has been right for me, the package has been ballistic – but there have been too many occasions where I have not managed to get the car where I need it for Saturday qualifying.
“That has then held me a bit back on a Sunday, so there is another level I need to get to with the car to be as confident as I would like to be. If I can, then I am going to be firmly in the mix.
“There is work to do and there is a little bit of extra speed to find – but I think we know where it is,” he added.