Bo Nielsen and his Astra VXR took on round two of Time Attack at Knockhill. Total Vauxhall has the story!

Jamie | NEWS | 31/05/2011 14:50pm

Sunday 15^th of May saw the UK Time Attack series pitch up at Scotland’s infamous Knockhill circuit in Fife. The track has long been a firm favourite with fans, and memories of John Cleland’s exploits here in the BTCC are the stuff of motorsport legend. As ever, Total Vauxhall paid special interest to 2010 champion Bo Nielsen and his Astra VXR self-built race car, competing in the 2wd Club Class.

Sunday dawned damp, cold and slippery – not ideal conditions for a 333bhp car driven through the front wheels. However Bo didn’t let that stop him posting quickest time in practice with a blistering 1min 01.021. This boded well for qualifying where conditions appeared to have taken a turn for the better. That was until 8 minutes in when the Scottish weather decided it’d like to play a part in proceedings again and liberally coated the entire circuit with rain. Romain Levesque managed to battle through the very worst of the elements to take pole in his CRX, closely followed by Gerry Atkinson in his Seat Leon and Bo in third, all covered by an astonishing 5 tenths of a second.

This set the scene for a fantastic Time Attack final later in the day, by which time the track had dried enough for the front wheel drive cars to put their power down effectively. Bo registered a best time of 1min 00.415 on his second lap, just pipping David Thorpe in his Civic by a miniscule 0.250 seconds. However with the track getting ever dryer and rubbered in the competition was far from over. After twelve Time Attack laps Levesque was closer than ever to Bo’s time, finally besting him with a time of 1 min 00.222, a mere 0.193 quicker. Only half a second covered the top three front wheel driver runners in the end.

A quick glance at the post-Knockhill championship standings show Bo still leading Gerry Atkinson’s Seat Leon, 208 points to 178, very closely followed by Dave Thorpe’s Civic on 175. With the championship that close it’s certainly worth popping over to Brands Hatch on the 25^th of June for round three.

Posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 2:50 pm under NEWS. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.