Turkington avoids the slip-ups at Oulton Park: 2020 BTCC rounds 7-9

Colin Turkington must not like bananas. Well, at least he avoids their skins like a bad smell. If ever there were a combination for the British Touring Car Championship leader to slip up, it was at Oulton Park, 2020.

While the Cheshire circuit has been traditionally kind to Turkington and Team BMW – they’d won three of the last six races there – all of the circumstances were there to catch the combination out. A tight and twisty track where mistakes are heavily punished, three mixed-conditions races, and their rivals back on form.

But fast forward to the end of the weekend, and there wasn’t a win for Turkington, or even one for a BMW, but the Northern Irishman still left with two podiums and a bagful of points as the challenge of his rivals largely fell apart.

We were treated to three different winners, as Rory Butcher finally got the win he so deserved before Ash Sutton turned around a tricky opener to claim the second race and then Adam Morgan held fast to take a shortened finale. But with the sort of metronomic consistency Turkington is displaying at the moment, he’s threatening to be out of sight rather soon.

The opener at Oulton couldn’t have been more different than last time out at Brands Hatch, both in terms of the weather and the luck of Butcher, who finally secured the first win for Motorbase’s new Ford Focus, albeit not quite in the manner he’d have liked as it came at the great misfortune of BTC Racing’s Josh Cook.

The scorching, tyre-torturing temperatures of Kent were replaced with heavy rain in Cheshire as the field lined up and – when the race finally did get underway after a long delay when Carl Boardley lost control of his BMW on the green flag lap and damaged the barriers at Deer Leap – the race presented the first potential banana skin for Turkington to slip upon.

The delay had allowed conditions to really take hold, with standing water developing at some key corners. Traditionally, Oulton has favoured rear-wheel drive machinery, with the extra traction of the format allowing a favourable drive out of the hairpin and chicane.

Turkington put that to good use in the dry qualifying, lugging a full 60kg of ballast to third on the grid, and things looked set. But the wet largely nullified the BMW’s advantage, as did the change of conditions on the grid, meaning most cars ran with 50-50, not-quite-dry not-quite-wet setups. That appeared to unsettle the BMW more than others, with the 330i M Sport looking more than a little twitchy.

Butcher had put in a superb qualifying to snatch his second successive pole in the Motorbase Ford Focus, but he was carrying 30kg of lead. With the conditions now favouring front-wheel drive, and with no weight onboard, Cook became the bookie’s favourite, starting second in the BTC Civic… even if his eventual getaway left a little to be desired.

At the start, Butcher did enough to fend off the fast-starting Turkington into Old Hall, as Cook bogged down and lost a hatful of places on the run to turn one.

However, Cook soon reasserted himself to run fourth at the end of the first tour. Out in front, Butcher set about trying to forge a gap over Turkington, who was slowly being dragged back into the pack as the ballast took effect. That opened the door for Cook, who pulled a great dive on the inside at Lodge to snatch third from Tom Oliphant in the second WSR BMW before honing in on Turkington and snatching second with a brave move at Druids.

A brief safety car period to remove Ollie Brown’s Volkswagen from the Old Hall barriers then put Cook right on Butcher’s tail, and the grey Civic wasted little time, latching on to Butcher’s bumper at the restart and then making a brilliant switchback on the brakes work to get alongside for the lead at Old Hall. Butcher tried to hang on, and the pair swapped some paint on the run down to Cascades before Butcher was eventually forced to cede.

Now out front and with the lighter car, Cook stroked it home for what appeared to be his first BTCC win of the season. But there were a few concerned faces as his car had some issues getting through the post-race ride-height checks due to some damage on his splitter. The rule stood that the roller wouldn’t pass under the bumper, so Cook was heartbreakingly thrown out of the result, handing the victory to Butcher.

“I’m gutted, for myself and especially for the team,” said Cook. “Rules are rules at the end of the day. We can argue it was unfair, but we just have to take it on the chin. The car felt mega, so hopefully we can fight back in the next race.”

Butcher added: “I was determined to win that race after what happened at Brands [a puncture robbed him in race one], but Josh was on a mission. When he got alongside into Old Hall I thought I might be able to hang on, but then a bit of risk management kicked in at Cascades and I knew I had to let him through. I thought he’d won that race as he was the faster man.”

Turkington continued to struggle, with Dan Cammish nipping past for third, and then a patch of water causing a lurid moment into Old Hall that allowed Jake Hill through as Hondas filled three of the top four spots before Cook’s removal. Turkington did enough to hold fifth on the road, which became fourth, as Tom Chilton’s BTC Civic came under huge late pressure from the recovering Tom Ingram in the Speedworks Toyota Corolla.

Ingram missed a lot of qualifying after a clash with Brown during the session and started a disappointed 14th on his local track, but climbed well through the order, usually dragging the hard-charging Ash Sutton along with him. While Ingram took sixth in the amended result, Sutton had to settle for eighth, behind Adam Morgan, as the Infiniti proved a difficult proposition in the wet, a fact not helped by an air intake clogged with mud that meant he had to drive with an eye to the temperature gauge for the entire race.