“I think there’s probably six really elite standout drivers in the championship at the moment, and I’d put Bobby in that six, definitely. He’s very fast, he’s deceptively quick, and he’s got a very calm head on his shoulders. He doesn’t get flustered, he looks inwardly at himself before blaming other things and other people and the car and everything, which is refreshing. He gets on with the job, and he’s a good racer as well.”
That’s three-time British Touring Car champion Matt Neal talking about the current cause celebre of the series, Bobby Thompson. You’ll know the 27-year-old Essex man as the guy hustling around in the middle of the pack in his Team Hard Cupra Leon, sometimes breaking through to the sharp end, often a victim of incidents or mechanical strife. That bloke who is there thanks to the faith of others – principally Team Hard chief Tony Gilham – yet who recently has had to sit on the sidelines when the squad realised the budget he’d been providing wasn’t enough to make ends meet.
Through 2022 and early 2023 there’d been a growing consensus that Thompson,
