BTCC Croft Qualyfing - Subaru surge to the top
Reigning champion Ash Sutton topped the timing screens at the end of today’s qualifying session ahead of team mate Jason Plato.
The Subaru Levorg set the pace early on as 24 year old Sutton then went on to beat his own time mid session to clock a 1.24.222, which was good enough to secure his and Team BMR’s first pole position of what has been a long season for the team. Plato was the closest to challenging Sutton, finishing just 0.156s back.
Today also showed why Croft is so good to the RWD machinery, as six of the top ten were RWD cars, backed up by the pace shown by all three WSR BMW’s and the Team Parker Racing BMW of Stephen Jelley.
Andrew Jordan completed a late run to take third place from Sam Tordoff in the Motorbase Ford Focus and Tom Ingram was not far off in fifth. Colin Turkington and Rob Collard were 6th and 7th ahead of Jelley in 8th.
Josh Cook again showed good performance in the Astra with ballast as he put his car into 9th ready for the first of tomorrows three races and Rob Austin also showed that HMS Racing have now started to unlock more performance gains from the Alfa Romeo by clocking the 10th best time and being in a great position to progress tomorrow.
Elsewhere on the grid, Matt Neal posted the 15th best time with team mate Dan Cammish down in 20th and the Eurotech trio of Jack Goff, Brett Smith and Matt Simpson endured a tough session and were 26th, 27th and 28th respectively.
With the grid all set for the three races tomorrow, it looks like we could be getting another different winner in the 2018 season, or will the championship front runners come through to spoil the party?
Words: Matt Gough
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