"I think there’s probably six really elite standout drivers in the championship at the moment, and I’d put Bobby in that six, definitely. He’s very fast, he’s deceptively quick, and he’s got a very calm head on his shoulders. He doesn’t get flustered, he looks inwardly at himself before blaming other things and other people and the car and everything, which is refreshing. He gets on with the job, and he’s a good racer as well.”
That’s three-time British Touring Car champion Matt Neal talking about the current cause celebre of the series, Bobby Thompson. You’ll know the 27-year-old Essex man as the guy hustling around in the middle of the pack in his Team Hard Cupra Leon, sometimes breaking through to the sharp end, often a victim of incidents or mechanical strife. That bloke who is there thanks to the faith of others – principally Team Hard chief Tony Gilham – yet who recently has had to sit on the sidelines when the squad realised the budget he’d been providing wasn’t enough to make ends meet.
Through 2022 and early 2023 there’d been a growing consensus that Thompson, now finally armed with a relatively new car after an early career hauling around the pensionable Hard Volkswagen CC and Trade Price Cars Audi S3, is potentially the BTCC ‘real deal’. Yet he had to stand down during the summer and miss three rounds because Gilham could no longer continue with the heavy subsidisation of his drive. Now he’s back for the final two events: at Silverstone recently, and Brands Hatch Grand Prix this weekend.
With the exit for 2023 of his own Team Dynamics squad, Neal has been “helping out” Team Hard, with his long-time technical director Barry Plowman engineering Thompson and another Dynamics techie, Tom Hunt, looking after the sister Cupra of Dan Lloyd. Thompson lies way down the points table – missing races, plus points penalties for engine changes, haven’t helped – yet he has the eighth best median average ‘supertime’ (each driver’s weekend best lap expressed as a percentage of the overall best) of the season. That’s impressive.
“For me, 2022 was all about trying to give results for Team Hard that they deserve with the work that they’ve put into that car, and showing people that the Cupra can be a really, really good car,” explains Thompson, who returned after a year out in 2021 to win the Jack Sears Trophy sub-division.
“It just needs a bit of love and maybe a little bit more engineering expertise. And I think we achieved that. That’s why on the jump from 2022 to 2023 you saw some new names that maybe wouldn’t have come across to Team Hard joining. That was job done, and the start of 2023 was all about ‘right, we’ve done that, now let’s actually go and fight at the front with this thing.’ And to be honest that’s all we did for the first half of the season.”
Source: Autosport