BTCC BECOMES THE BRITISH HILL CLIMB CHAMPIONSHIP
That little bloke from Kent is on something of a roll in the British Touring Car Championship. Jake Hill made the long trip back south from Croft with a newly secured position of second in the standings, and is now 10 points closer to Ash Sutton at the summit. Most importantly, he scored what is, remarkably, only the second race win of his BTCC career, the first not to come from a reversed grid. Hill said last month that, should he clinch the 2021 title, he wouldn’t care if he hadn’t won a race. His emotions last Sunday afternoon suggested otherwise.
Largely thanks to the vagaries of the sporting regulations, Hill and the Motorbase-run MB Motorsport Ford Focus team had been locked out of the top spot on the podium before last weekend. He’s been in the upper-to-middle echelons of success ballast all season, making wins in races one and two on a weekend tricky, and the Ford had been carrying that weight too well for Hill to be slow enough to luck into a top reversed-grid starting spot.
That changed at Croft. Hill arrived fourth in the championship, therefore on 48kg of success ballast, but remarkably was able to pull out a qualifying time just 0.040 seconds adrift of the polesitting, weight-free Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50 of Aiden Moffat to sit second on the grid. “I’m gutted to miss out on my first BTCC pole
