LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ will be feeling confident ahead of the Kwik Fit British Touring Car Championship’s trip to Donington Park this weekend (24-25 August), as the team’s Toyota Corolla GR Sport returns to the scene of plentiful past success.
It was at Donington back in 2019 that the British-built, Speedworks Motorsport-prepared ‘hot hatch’ claimed its maiden victory in the BTCC – in only its sixth start in the UK’s premier motor racing series. Last year, the ‘GP’ loop that awaits the 20-strong field this weekend witnessed another Toyota triumph, while Aiden Moffat won around the shorter ‘National’ circuit earlier this season.
The 27-year-old Scot produced one of the performances of his career that spring day to fend off multiple champions Colin Turkington and Ash Sutton right to the chequered flag. Buoyed by a competitive display on home soil at Knockhill last time out, he is targeting another champagne celebration four months on.
Team-mate Josh Cook similarly has his sights set solidly on silverware at Donington. The Bath-born ace – twice an Independents’ champion in the BTCC – has finished three of the most recent five contests in 2024 inside the top four. Having lost ground after a trouble-filled final race at Knockhill, the 33-year-old is aiming to get his title tilt back on-track in Leicestershire.
Following Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session at 15:05 – streamed on ITV Sport’s YouTube channel – every moment of Sunday’s doorhandle-to-doorhandle action will be broadcast live and in high-definition on ITV4, beginning at 10:45. All three races will also be shown on the ITV Sport TikTok channel, in the UK and globally.
Christian Dick, Team Principal, LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ, said: “We always enjoy going to Donington, and it’s great to see so many smiling faces from TMUK coming along to support us. It’s somewhere we’ve had a lot of success with the Corolla, and having seen the benefit of our mid-season upgrades at both Croft and Knockhill, we are very hopeful of continuing that trend this weekend.
“The ‘GP’ circuit is a classic track that really challenges drivers and teams, blending the fast, flowing nature of the ‘National’ layout with the addition of two slow-speed hairpins at the end of the lap that require an altogether different approach and provide excellent overtaking opportunities.
“We’re getting towards the business end of the season now, making it even more vital that we extract the most out of every single second we spend on-track. Consistency is king in the BTCC – and a consistently strong weekend at Donington is exactly what we are targeting.”
Josh Cook, Driver, LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ, said: “We went really well at Croft last month and then again at Knockhill, where we scored a second and a fourth-place finish. We’re understanding the car more and more and we had really good pace all weekend in Scotland, so I think we’ve got a little bit of momentum on our side.
“Donington is obviously a slightly different style of circuit to where we’ve been recently, being very smooth and very long, and the ‘GP’ layout isn’t one where we have a huge amount of experience or data to fall back upon, so we need to make sure we really maximise our track time in free practice to get the car into a window from where we can deliver some good results.
“Of course, race three at Knockhill took us a little bit out of contention in the title battle, but it’s still very close at the top of the table so if we can have two really strong weekends between now and the Brands Hatch finale, we’ll be right back in it. We just need to keep fighting, which I have every intention of doing and hopefully that will enable us to come away from Donington with another big points haul.”
Aiden Moffat, Driver, LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ, said: “We obviously went well around Donington’s ‘National’ circuit earlier in the year, and we’re going back there in a positive frame of mind. The Grand Prix loop adds a couple of hairpins into the mix, which turns it into a different kind of challenge, but I think we should be in strong shape regardless.
“There will be more options regarding where to deploy hybrid and having the full allocation in qualifying and race one will unquestionably be a benefit, but being a longer lap, we won’t be able to exploit it everywhere we want to, so we will need to figure out how to use it to its best advantage.
“We were quick in the races at Knockhill, which was a much-needed boost after a couple of tough weekends where we simply couldn’t catch a break, but we are still clearly struggling in qualifying, so we need to try something a little bit different there to hopefully give ourselves less work to do on Sunday. Ultimately, the objective is always the same – we want to come away with some silverware.”
