DAN Rowbottom admits the early leaders in the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) are ‘becoming a bit of a problem’ after he failed to close the gap at Oulton Park.
The Kidderminster driver secured a podium finish in the final race at the Cheshire circuit as the first half of the season drew to a close.
Rowbottom sits fourth in the drivers’ standings on 159 points with Ash Sutton top on 233 points and Tom Ingram just behind on 223 points.
The NAPA Racing UK driver finished 14th in race one, sixth in race two and third in race three at Oulton Park.
However, Rowbottom is looking forward to the second half of the campaign with the BTCC season to resume at Croft on the weekend of August 2 and 3.
Rowbottom said: “It’s a positive end to the weekend, we should have got a little bit more out of that race.
“Just a couple of little mistakes early on, trying to go around the outside at the chicane just locked the whole car up and cost us a lot of time.
“We’ll take a P3 to finish the first half of the season, it’s been an okay first half of the year, we need to focus on the remainder of the season now.
“The problem with Oulton is, it’s a fantastic place, these cars are big now.
“When the conditions change, you’ve only got to drop a wheel off and come back on, it’s very difficult to not collect someone.
“There were a lot of incidents this weekend, it’s been a bit frantic, it’s touring car racing, that’s what we do.
“Qualifying was odd for us, we had really good pace in FP1. FP2 we were exactly where we expected to be given our tyre and turbo boost combination.
“Then it didn’t really turn on for us in qualifying, the whole weekend has been a bit strange.
“We’ll take it, we’ve had a half decent weekend.
“We’re sitting well, we’re somewhere near the front [of the table].
“Ash and Tom have extended that gap again which is becoming a bit of a problem because there’s only 15 races left.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do but we’re going to some of my favourite tracks now, I’m really looking forward to getting my head down.”
