Barrow-upon-Humber racer Martyn Bell endured a difficult weekend at Rockingham as the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship returned to the Northamptonshire venue for the first time since 2003.

The Team AllAboutProperty.com driver headed to the Rock on the back of a solid start to his campaign at Brands Hatch and was hopeful of securing his first points of the season with the ex-World Touring Car Championship BMW 320i.

However, results didn’t come his way in the three races at the high-speed venue, leaving Martyn to look ahead to the third round of the season at Thruxton in just over a week’s time and put the Rockingham weekend firmly behind him.

After qualifying in 18th place on the grid, Martyn was looking to make his moves up the order in the opening race and finished the first race in 15th place after battling past the Arkas Racing Astra of Erkut Kizilirmak in the closing laps. However, Martyn saw his chances of making further progress in the second race come to an end on the first lap after a multi-car accident ahead involving Colin Turkington, Matt Neal, Mike Jordan and Eoin Murray.

Braking to avoid the incident, Martyn was hit in the right rear, damaging the car and leaving his tyre rubbing against the body work. With the tyre smoking, Martyn was forced to bring the BMW into the pits, where the team quickly removed the rear bumper to get him back on track, albeit a lap behind the rest of the field. Despite that, he quickly un-lapped himself from former Kumho BMW rival Rick Kerry and then set about trying to close the lap distance to Kerry’s BMW 1 Series in front – eventually missing out on eleventh place by just four seconds at the chequered flag.

With the team repairing the car, Martyn was hopeful of securing points in the final race of the weekend, but a driveshaft failure at the start of the green flag lap meant his race was over before it even started, to bring a tough weekend to a disappointing finish.

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“We came with high expectations, but it just didn’t go to plan,” Martyn admitted. “The car didn’t work as well as hoped it would, but the other BMWs suffered a similar fate. In the first race we tried a different set-up that didn’t quite work for us but we finished 15th which is all we could have expected.

“I got a good start to race two, but the incident on lap one led to a tyre rubbing and I couldn’t do more than 100mph on the banking with it like that, so I was forced to pit. It put me a lap down but I almost un-lapped myself from Rick and we ended up with twelfth. I thought that was a good place to start the third race and the guys did well to get the car straight and then the driveshaft broke on the green flag lap.

“We could have had some points from that second race, even though they would have been lucky ones. I’ve had a rough weekend but we live to fight another day and will be out giving it our all at Thruxton.”

However, despite the problems on track, there was one plus point from the weekend, with Martyn’s damaged bumper from race two being donated to a charity auction on popular website EBay to raise funds for the Bedrock Hospital Radio in Romford.

“No matter what sort of a weekend I had there is always someone worse off than you,” Martyn said, “so if the donation of some broken body work from my car can be put to a good cause then the weekend wasn’t so bad after all. I hope it makes a lot of money.”