Bristol Street Motors Technicians Live The Dream At Oulton Park
Two technicians from Bristol Street Motors were able the ‘live the dream’ for a weekend after joining up with one of the top teams in the British Touring Car Championship during the most recent event of the year at Oulton Park.
Adam Davis and Melvyn Dutton were both nominated to join up with the EXCELR8 Motorsport-run Team BRISTOL STREET MOTORS squad when it visited the Cheshire circuit for the fifth meeting of the season.
The pair headed for the track on Thursday to assist with setting up for the event, and would carry out a variety of different roles across a weekend that saw the team secure its fourth win of the 2024 season.
Adam, a Service and Maintenance Technician at Bristol Street Motors Redditch Ford, joined the engineering team on the car of Tom Chilton, meaning he would experience the highs and lows of motorsport across the weekend.
After Chilton qualified on the second row of the grid on Saturday and then scored a top six finish in race one, he was unfortunately forced to retire from race two after power steering failure – resulting in the team being put to work to fix the issue for the final race.
Unfortunately, he would be unable to take the start due to an issue with the onboard fire extinguisher on his Hyundai i30 Fastback N.
“I’ve really seen the emotions that go with being part of the team this weekend and it’s been a fantastic experience,” Adam reflected. “Everyone on my car was on a huge high after qualifying and race one, and so much hard work then went in to making sure it was repaired after race two. Seeing the car come back into the pits ahead of race three was gutting, and you could see the disappointment in people’s eyes.
“Even with that, I’ve really enjoyed the whole experience, as everyone within the team was so welcoming. It’s a very high pressure and fast paced environment to be part of, and it really showed how important morale is when everyone has to pull together.
“That is certainly something I can take back to the dealership with me, and I would tell anyone that if they are offered the opportunity to do this, then they should grab it with both hands as it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance. If I could do it again, then I definitely would!”
Melvyn meanwhile, a Senior Technician at Bristol Street Motors Crewe Ford with more than 30 years’ service with the company, was tasked with working with the tyre team to prepare the Goodyear tyres being used by all four cars across the weekend.
At Oulton Park, that included twelve new soft tyres and four new hard tyres for each car, as well as eight tyres carried over from a previous event, all of which had to be marked with an identification number and then allocated to a driver before track action began.
From there, he would work with the engineering team to ensure that the correct tyres were ready for each session at the correct pressures, before helping to prepare used tyres to go back into the carryover allocation.
“The whole weekend has been an absolute blast, and it was completely different to what I imagined it would be like,” he said. “People don’t appreciate how much work goes in before the cars even leave the garage, and it’s a massive team effort.
“You might think that preparing tyres is an easy job, but there is a lot of responsibility on your shoulders and a lot of pressure. You can prepare everything to the set of figures you’ve been given by the engineers and then suddenly, they all need to be changed with ten minutes to go before a race because the temperature has changed – so you have to be ready for everything to change at the last minute.
“When Nick Halstead had an off in qualifying, we all had to jump on the car to help strip it down and make sure everything was okay, and it showed how important it is to work as a team. That for me is the biggest thing to take away from the whole experience, as it doesn’t matter how strong you are as an individual if don’t have the team around you to be successful.
“This is something I never imagined I would have the opportunity to do, and a huge thank you to everyone who made it possible.”
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