Cook serves up a delicious starter
Josh Cook wasn’t at the forefront of the British Touring Car Championship gossip pre-season. He’s remained at the BTC Racing Honda team to drive its Civic Type R for a third successive campaign, amid all the winter chopping and changing on the driver-and-car line-ups. There was no sign of setting the world on fire in the official test at Silverstone. And the end of BTC’s two-year tie-up with Civic builder Team Dynamics coincided with a switch from the potent Neil Brown-built Honda engines to the‘bog-standard’ TOCA Swindon unit.
Yet there was the lofty Bath redhead last weekend at Thruxton, bursting out of the blocks with speed when it mattered, and rough-but-the-right-side-of-fair racecraft when required, to brush off the opposition and blitz the first two races. Reigning champion Ash Sutton could have been the talk of the town at the Hampshire speedbowl; his Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50, with a winter of development upon it, now appears to be quick in all conditions, yet bad luck meant he would have to wait until the reversed-grid finale to notch up his deserved win. And Jake Hill was a superstar on his first race weekend with the Ford Focus. He finished third in all three races for the Motorbase-run MB Motorsport team and leads the championship by one point from Cook, and it was an exquisite yet aggressive drive in the finale, on slick tyres in the wet, that deservedly earned him the plaudits.
It was that weather that made Thruxton inconclusive as to the
