Following a five-week summer break, the 2024 British Touring Car Championship resumes this weekend (27-28 July) at Croft in North Yorkshire – scene of plenty of previous success for LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ duo Josh Cook and Aiden Moffat.
The pair concluded the opening half of the campaign sitting respectively fifth and ninth in the standings amongst the 21 high-calibre protagonists – with both reaching the top step of the rostrum along the way.
They are similarly both former winners at Croft. Indeed, two-time BTCC Independents’ champion Cook has tallied 15 consecutive points finishes at the track dating back to 2019, including at least one trip to the podium in each of those seasons and a commanding double victory in 2020. Last year there, the Bath-born ace was never outside the top five, and he returns with his tail up off the back of his 19thtriumph in the UK’s premier motor racing series in its latest outing at Oulton Park.
Team-mate Moffat enjoyed the most successful weekend of his BTCC career thus far at Croft three years ago, converting his maiden pole position in the championship into victory in race one and consolidating that with the runner-up spoils in race two. The 27-year-old Scot has been a consistent points-finisher at the circuit in recent campaigns, too.
Much like its current drivers, the British-built Toyota Corolla GR Sport has proved its prowess at Croft, with the Japanese hatchback a winner there in 2020. Upgrades brought to the car over the mid-season hiatus have raised hopes of further silverware for the Speedworks Motorsport-run outfit this weekend.
Following Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session at 15:00 – 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 11:15. All three races will additionally be shown on the ITV Sport TikTok channel, in the UK and globally.
Christian Dick, Team Principal, LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ, said: “It’s always good to have a break – especially after such a frenetic first half of the season – but equally, it’s just as good to go racing again once the batteries have been recharged, and I think I speak for the whole team when I say we are champing at the bit to get back out on-track.
“While everybody has enjoyed some much-needed and very well-deserved time off, we certainly haven’t been idle over the past few weeks, and we have spent a lot of time evaluating every aspect of our performance during the first half of the campaign to see where and how we can improve. That has resulted in a number of upgrades to the Corolla that we are looking forward to rolling out this weekend.
“Croft is such an all-round challenge as a circuit that it is almost the perfect proving-ground for those developments. You really need a car you can lean on through the longer corners, and then in the tighter, more technical sections, good braking and traction are key. Hybrid will also likely be significant, particularly accelerating out of Tower Bend up to the Jim Clark Esses and exiting the final hairpin onto the start/finish straight.
“We should get a good indication in free practice of the impact of the changes we’ve made, and then we’ll find out in qualifying who has done their mid-season homework best. We’re feeling excited – bring it on!”
Josh Cook, Driver, LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ, said: “I think we’ve done well at maximising what we’ve had so far this year, and when we’ve not quite had the pace, we’ve still managed to play the game and score some solid points. We can be happy with the job we’ve done, but now we need to start closing the gap to the guys at the very top of the standings if we want to remain in contention right to the end.
“We’ve got the data we collected from a pre-season test we did at Croft, which is always useful, and the team seems to have made some positive progress during the break in terms of developments, so now it’s time to corroborate them out on-track. In the BTCC, it’s all about finding regular small improvements that incrementally add up to big results.
“I enjoy going to Croft. It’s somewhere that’s been good to me in the past and is where I achieved my first double win in the BTCC. I like its blend of high-speed and slower, more technical sections, which means you’re constantly having to adapt your mindset and approach around the lap. That’s a challenge not only for us as drivers but also for the engineers in terms of establishing a good balance in the car, but what I love about it is that when you do produce a good lap, it feels very rewarding.
“We need to make sure we get the Corolla in the window pretty quickly so we can really extract the maximum out of it in qualifying, especially with the new format where you have to set not just one quick lap but one in each part of the session. Then in the races, we want to be on the podium again and fighting for wins – and most importantly, bagging as many points as we can.”
Aiden Moffat, Driver, LKQ Euro Car Parts with SYNETIQ, said: “Croft is a great track to drive – a lot of fun and quite challenging, too. It’s a slightly longer lap than some other circuits and there are many things you have to get right to truly optimise it. It’s a real mixture of fast sections, technical sections and everything in-between, and the key is to find a compromise that achieves the best of both worlds. You need to attack it from all angles while knowing when to be aggressive and when to be patient – but for me, that only serves to make it more enjoyable.
“The team has been working hard in the background over the past few weeks in an effort to make improvements, which looks very positive, and I’m excited to see how that translates when we get back out on-track. Hopefully it has also resolved some of the reliability issues we encountered during the first part of the season that cost us a couple of podium finishes – when we get into strong situations like that, we need to make sure we really capitalise.
“It’s difficult to predict how much effect hybrid will have this weekend. It will always help, clearly, but at some circuits we’ve been to, we thought it would be really powerful and then it wasn’t, whereas at others, it’s been the opposite.
“One thing at Croft is that being a longer lap, there’s more opportunity to claw back lost time, but the key for qualifying will be to have a productive run throughout practice to give ourselves the best shot possible of securing a strong grid position. If we can do that, the aim is to fight for podiums.”
