Hollamby and AmD Milltek Racing buoyed by Golf tweaks

Shaun Hollamby hopes to be much closer to his mid-field target in Snetterton's Dunlop British Touring Car Championship round even though it’s not his VW Golf’s best track.

Hollamby believes his AmD Milltek racing.com team has made significant improvements with its lone Golf in the seven weeks since the previous round at Croft.

Significantly in recent testing at Snetterton he matched the pace of fellow newcomer Forster Motorsport’s pair of BMWs and Boulevard Team Racing’s Vauxhall Astra. That in part was thanks to an engine rebuild at specialist company Lehmann's factory in the alpine microstate of Liechtenstein which helped restore power to pre-Croft levels.

“On the Tuesday after Croft, we ran the car on the rolling road at AmD’s Thurrock base”, explained Hollamby. “The figures showed us running 245bhp, compared to 300bhp of the leaders! Considering we were two seconds a lap off the pace at Croft but were losing 8-10mph down the straights means that with similar power to the leaders we will be getting much closer to our mid-field target.”

Hollamby says the signs that his team had already started to improve the Golf’s competitiveness – as well as its own performance in the high-pressure world of the BTCC – were clear at Croft.

He added: “Croft was our best weekend of the year so far. The feeling amongst the whole team to go away from Croft with a straight car, two race finishes, much improved pace and doubling our points tally in the Independent teams championship was brilliant!”

Now during the season’s second half he’s hoping to build on that following the promise shown in testing at Snetterton. There his squad also tried a more integrated front bumper to aid the Golf’s aerodynamics plus concentrated on fine-tuning its new KW suspension – the Germany company have flown in renowned engineer Lutz Passon to work with the team's technical boss Stuart Beaton on set-up.

Hollamby continued: "The testing restrictions in the BTCC mean that this was our first test session of the year and we made a myriad of set-up changes to which the Golf responded well and which allowed us to set times ahead of cars that we normally struggle to match on outright pace.

“We ended the morning session just over 2 seconds off the front running pace of the works Chevrolet and, more importantly, ahead of the Forster BMWs and Boulevard’s Vauxhall, which bodes well for the rest of the season”. Heavy rain during the afternoon session prevented any further improvement in lap times.

"Snetterton was always going to be our least competitive circuit due to its high speed nature, which favours cars with the most horsepower. But we’ve improved our speed trap figures and our other developments will become more apparent on circuits where horsepower isn't such an important factor".