After picking up his second victory of the 2015 Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship season in the final race of the day at Croft, Rob Collard admitted he felt “real joy” driving the BMW 125i on its most competitive weekend of the campaign.
Collard picked up results of third and sixth earlier in the day in North Yorkshire, before backing up the victories of his West Surrey Racing team-mates Andy Priaulx and Sam Tordoff in the final encounter of the day as he came out on top in a straight fight with Honda’s Gordon Shedden.
“It’s a real joy to drive the car”, Collard enthused to The Checkered Flag afterwards on a fabulous weekend for WSR. “It’s history in the making for the team to get three wins in one day. Also, to have a 1-2-3 on the podium earlier in the day was fantastic.
Commenting on his third race triumph, Collard said he had to fight harder than expected, saying: “To be honest, [Shedden] put a good move on me and then when I tried to hunt him down he started pulling away, so I was a bit amazed.
“Luckily in the end his tyres started going off and it started coming to me. I knew it was game on and I could get him.”
The day saw Collard involved in a more controversial collision with Shedden earlier in the day during race two at the Jim Clark Esses, an incident they both had strong opinions about afterwards.
The final race saw a calmer duel between the pair end without drama, Collard saying: “No damage was done, then we both had a great race in race three. The Hondas were much better under braking into Tower corner, so Gordon could make the move and make it clean.”
Collard now moves up to eighth in the championship as a result and says that he hopes WSR will keep up their momentum, saying: “I hope so. I think we’ve made a bit of a step in performance with the BMW at the moment but we always knew it would be strong here.
“We’ll have to wait and see what it’s like a Snetterton and whether we need to step up even more.”
