Jason Plato set the pace in first practice for this weekend’s British Touring Car Championship event at Silverstone, from Dave Newsham and Gordon Shedden.
Click here for the full first practice results.
MG driver Plato, who still has an outside shot at the 2013 title, traded a handful of fastest laps with Speedworks’ Newsham with ten minutes gone in the session, the pair the only drivers to dip under Plato’s qualifying lap record of 58.717s from last season.
They remained clear of the rest of the pack until the end of the session, with a pack of five drivers closely occupying the next positions. The session was both productive and encouraging for Honda, with Shedden setting the third fastest time and completing 30 laps in the 40-minute session. His time was 0.417s behind that of Plato’s, and just 0.065s ahead of teammate Neal, four positions further back.
Between the Honda duo Frank Wrathall underlined the strong pace of the Toyota cars this weekend with the fourth fastest lap, with Motorbase’s Tom Onslow-Cole stealing into the top five with a fast final run, having been quiet throughout the rest of the session. Andrew Jordan was the other driver to beat Neal, the new championship leader just 0.002s ahead in sixth.
Sam Tordoff, Colin Turkington and Adam Morgan completed the top ten positions, in an incident-free practice which saw green flag running throughout. Once more the competitiveness of the field was underlined by the times at the Northamptonshire circuit, with the top sixteen drivers all covered by less than a second.
Lea Wood was the fastest S2000 runner in 24th ahead of his only competitor in Liam Griffin, while young race Aiden Moffat ended his first practice session with Team HARD. as the slowest runner, 2.926s off the pace.