Silverstone BTCC: Sutton claims second career pole

The 22-year-old led Speedworks Toyota driver Tom Ingram by just three-thousandths of a second in the 30-minute session, with Triple Eight teammate Josh Cook qualifying third.

The key times were all set during the first ten minutes of the session before things started to settle down, with Colin Turkington the first driver to set a time under the one minute mark when the session started, shortly followed by Sutton in the MG.

Following Sutton, Ingram then improved his time to temporarily take pole, before Turkington then broke into the 58s, with Adam Morgan following up with a 58.537 in his Ciceley Mercedes before Sutton pulled out what would be the pole time of 58.321.

From then on, there were no major improvements, with many improvements shortly followed by a stewards call to delete the relevant lap time with track limits at Copse being tested.

Ingram managed to hurl his Toyota up to second, only to have his lap time immediately deleted due to track limits, but he was able to repeat his time and retake the spot, splitting the two MGs before the half-way mark of the session.

Andrew Jordan qualified in fourth in the Motorbase Ford Focus, with Adam Morgan down in fifth in his Mercedes A-Class, with the Handy Motorsport Toyota of Rob Austin sixth.

The best-placed of the championship protagonists was Matt Neal in seventh in the Honda Civic, with Hunter Abbott’s Power Maxed Chevrolet eighth, Aron Smith’s BKR Volkswagen ninth and Gordon Shedden in the Honda completing the top ten.

There was drama for points leader Sam Tordoff, who had a coming together with his West Surrey Racing BMW team-mate Rob Collard half-way through the session.

The two continued, but qualified well down the order, with Collard 16th and Tordoff 18th, with Tordoff carrying the maximum ballast of 75kg.

Of the Team BMR Subarus, Warren Scott was the best-placed in 13th, while Turkington qualified in 15th but will fall to the back courtesy of a grid penalty overhanging him from the last race at Rockingham.

The session was interrupted with five minutes to go when Team BKR’s Mark Howard crashed out at Copse, but with no time for the competitors tyres to get back up to temperature, there were no improvements when the session was restarted.

Neil Hudson / TouringCarTimes