BTCC Season 2025 – Oulton Park – free practice 1
Good morning everybody and welcome to our weekend here at Oulton Park in Cheshire where despite the temperature being 30° it is slightly cloudy, and we are all sat on the edges of our seats as there is the possibility of thunderstorms in time for qualifying later on this afternoon! It is certainly horribly muggy and the team and the drivers are really finding this weather tough going.
This morning’s first action however is Free Practise 1 where both Aidan and Charles decided to take a conservative engineering session, using only the medium and hard tyres and concentrating on getting the best possible setups for the day’s later sessions and of course, the all-important Qualifying which happens at 3:00 this afternoon.
Aiden was out first and during the session found that he was having a really strong first sector on the circuit whilst being slightly down on speed in Sector 2 but this is difficult to compare with those at the top of the board during the session as they were using the much quicker soft tyres.
Charles also decided not to use a soft tyre at any point during the session and over the course of the 35 minutes the two cars were on track, they were just 0.2 of a second apart on the timing screens. Whilst this left him approximately one second slower than those cars who had been out on the soft tyres, it is not unreasonable looking at the data to suggest that the soft tyre is worth about 1.2 seconds so it looks as though we are really competitive around the 2.2 mile undulating and very twisty Cheshire circuit.
We will be heading out shortly for Free Practise 2, where we hope to develop the setups even further possibly consider using a soft tyre. The only potential fly in the ointment at this stage is that it has gone far more humid and there has been the odd very small spots of drizzle appearing at various points around the circuit.
We will bring you all of the action from free practise 2 in about an hour and a half time and we look forward to bringing you qualifying in brackets subject to thunderstorms and flooding closed brackets later on this afternoon.