Colin Turkington said that Sunday could be a different story for Silverline Subaru BMR Racing at Silverstone, starting from 29th on the grid for the opening Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship race of the weekend.
The double BTCC champion’s lowly starting position comes from a grid penalty handed out after a brace of indiscretions at Rockingham, Turkington therefore starting 29th rather than his qualifying position of 15th at Silverstone’s national circuit.
Turkington, no stranger to a recovery drive after climbing from 15th to the podium in race three at Rockingham, expects overtaking to be a tougher prospect at the shorter 1.64-mile national layout however.
Speaking with The Checkered Flag on Sunday morning, Turkington said: “Coming from 29th on the grid, we’ve got more work [to do] than normal. I don’t know what we can achieve.
“We’ve just got to try and make progress in race one and I’ll work my way through in the course of the day. It’s not going to be easy here because our pace hasn’t been fantastic, but the race can be a different story. It’s like a race three grid for race one so you never know what can happen.”
Turkington said that outright straight-line speed is not one of Team BMR’s strongest performance areas, but that a race situation would lessen the issue.
“I’ll have to find an alternative route to get past. We’ll see, but the race is always different to qualifying”, said the Suvaru Levorg driver, who sits 48 points adrift of Sam Tordoff with six races to run.
“Places like Rockingham, or even Brands Hatch present a lot more overtaking”, said Turkington. “Here, if you have a quick car on the straights then you can get a good slipstream, but that’s not one of our strengths at the moment.
The Northern Irishman admitted that the 30-minute qualifying session became a test outing for himself, but remained coy as to whether additional knowledge gained could play to his advantage.
“We saved two set of tyres for today, plus I was able to test a few more things in qualifying which will be a little bit beneficial. We’ve had limited dry running this weekend, but everybody’s in the same boat.”
