Triple Eight Race Engineering’s will back to full strength for this weekend’s Avon Tyres British GT Championship meeting at Rockingham.
The team endured mixed results as the season opened at Oulton Park, with Derek Johnston and Luke Hines scoring a pair of points finishes on the debut with the team. However teammates Lee Mowle and Joe Osborne were kept out of the two 60 minute races after a practice accident heavily damaged their #8 BMW Z4 GT3.
Striking a stationary car after Mowle spun in the closing minutes of practice the car suffered irreparable damage to the shell.
But, after a week of tireless work by the Ian Harrison led team a new shell has been fitted to the car, allowing Mowle and Osborne to hunt for their first points of the 2014 season.
“Obviously Oulton Park was a massive disappointment for us. To not even get the chance to race is always painful, even more so when you’ve gone quickest of anyone in free practice two,” said Osborne. “The positives we can draw from the weekend are that we had a good level of pace at arguably our worst circuit on the calendar, and the second car with Derek and Luke in it was on tremendous form too.”
“Rockingham is a place where we definitely have unfinished business. Last year we picked up a puncture that ruined our race, but this year hopefully we’ll be luckier. I won at Rockingham in 2012 and it always delivers an exciting race for the fans and I don’t see any reason why we can’t challenge for podiums this weekend with both cars.”
While Mowle and Osborne were limited to an eleventh place finish last year, Johnston – then part of the MTECH team – rode a tremendous drive through the field to finish in eighth place.
He looked ahead to the two hour race this weekend; “I expect to be on the podium, nothing else will do. I like Rockingham a lot, and I really like driving the BMW Z4 too. Undoubtedly the Porsches and Astons will be quick there, but we showed at Oulton that we have good pace and we proved we can race too. So, with that in mind I don’t think it’s cocky to say that is what we want out of the weekend; we’re well up for it!”
www.theCheckeredFlag.co.uk will have full coverage of the Rockingham weekend, including live blog text coverage of the race.
