Adam Morgan enjoyed his best-ever weekend in the British Touring Car Championship at Donington Park last weekend, amidst the backdrop of behind-the-scenes challenges at the CPRL squad.
Morgan moved from eighth to fourth in the drivers’ standings after scoring a qualifying race win and two outright victories on Sunday, whilst he also managed ninth in race two when he had to run the hard tyre along with the least TOCA Turbo Boost [TTB] in the field.
Morgan’s results come in the context of a fine weekend at Knockhill two weeks’ prior as well, when he scored the team’s maiden win along with another podium.
“We’re riding a wave at the moment,” Morgan told TouringCars.Net. “When things go well in motorsport, they tend to keep going well.
“For example, ball ten being drawn for race three put me on the front row, on the right tyre, with maximum deployment. Things just seem to happen for you.
“We’re on a great run, we’ve got a really good car underneath us, and we’ve capitalised on having maximum TTB for the last two rounds.
“We’ve made no mistakes, everything has run exactly as it should, and the team, car, crew and everyone involved have been faultless.
“But things change when we go to Croft, because somehow, we’re fourth in the championship, so we’ll go there with limited TTB. That’s going to be our next test.
Morgan, who was on holiday when Plato Racing entered into administration last week, acknowledged his role as a customer in the CPRL outfit, having kept himself at a distance from the changes behind the scenes at the team.
“Right now, I’m just happy to be on the grid and happy to be here. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of background stuff going on, but as a customer, I just want the car to be here and performing as it is now. I want to do my job as well as I can.”
Although Morgan has previously driven the Mercedes A35 at Croft back in late March, it was his first run in the brand new car, and he admits it has been fundamentally changed since those first tentative laps.
“It is a complete unknown now because that was our first-ever run in the Mercedes.
“To sum it up, it was awful. We went there with an idea for the car and it didn’t work. Quite honestly, it was terrifying.
“So, the data we have from Croft is pretty much null and void. What we do have now are two weekends where the car has been in a really good window with a strong base setup.
“The fact that it worked at Knockhill and Donington, two completely different circuits, and was very fast at both, gives us reason to go to Croft expecting to be competitive again.”
Beyond Croft, Morgan also expects the car to continue to perform well at Silverstone later in September.
“One of the reasons the team chose this car is it has the lowest drag coefficient on the grid. It was selected to be fast and efficient in a straight line.
“We’ve got that, but now we’ve also got a chassis that works well in terms of rotation, traction and braking, and it rides the kerbs well.
“I’d like to think that wherever we take this car now, it should perform well. It’s up to me to get the most out of it with limited TTB.
“If you look at race two, Ash brought it home in second [with little TTB] and I finished ninth [with the least TTB in the field]. That’s our next step as a team: making sure that when we don’t have the TTB advantage, we still have the pace in the car.”