Adam Morgan in the #33 Cicely Motorsport BMW 330i M Sport finished third in races one and two and fifth in race three in the August 1 British Touring Car Championship event run at Oulton Park. Stephen Jelley in the #12 BMW 330i M Sport led the charge for Team BMW/West Surrey Racing, while his teammates Colin Turkington and Tom Oliphant both had difficult weekends. Jelley finished fifth and seventh in the first two races and then made it to the podium with a third-place finish in race three.
Both Turkington and Oliphant were set back in the first race in collisions caused by other racers. Oliphant was caught up in an early-race collision that took his car out of both that race and the second; the team was able to get the car back to the grid for race three, where he was able to finish fourteenth. Turkington was forced off course just two corners into the first race. He fell to the back of the pack, but recovered to finish eighteenth. He scored points with a twelfth-place finish in race two and went on to finish eighth in race three.
The race winners were Daniel Rowbottom in a Honda Civic Type R in race one, Rory Butcher in a Toyota Corolla in race two, and Senna Proctor in a Honda Civic Type R in race three.
Morgan was fifth in drivers’ points after Oulton Park, while Turkington, who went into the event fourth, fell to ninth. BMW continues to lead manufacturers’ points.
Turkington said afterward, “The Race One incident ruined my weekend. When you get pushed off the track like that and drop to the back it becomes so difficult to fight your way through, especially with the pack as closely-matched as it is now in the BTCC. The one silver lining is that we now go to Knockhill—traditionally a track that suits rear-wheel-drive cars like the BMW—with almost no success ballast, and that can only be a benefit as we try to start fighting back in the championship and taking points of the others.”
The Knockhill event will be run on August 14–15.—Brian Morgan
[Photo courtesy Jakob Ebrey/BMW.]
