Outgoing British Touring Car champion Ash Sutton was pleased to qualify in tenth position for race one at Brands Hatch after a full front end replacement was required on his Subaru following a heavy shunt in second practice.
After topping the opening British Touring Car Championship practice session, Sutton then set a time good enough for second before a stuck throttle on the entrance to Paddock Hill Bend caused a high-speed off.
The damage sustained necessitated a full front end replacement, with Team BMR completing the repair in time to get Sutton out in qualifying.
He told TouringCars.Net that due to the all-new front end, the setup on his Subaru Levorg GT was not optimised for the 2.4-mile Brands Hatch GP circuit.
“Obviously we didn’t get a setup for what we would have liked for qualifying,” said Sutton. “It was just basically getting the car out there.
“The team did a mega job on that – can’t fault them. So thanks to the team for getting the car out there and I just made the best of a bad situation.
“Obviously if we didn’t have the accident in FP2 things might have been different.”
Sutton said he had no indication that the car had a stuck throttle until he was fully committed to Paddock Hill Bend, causing him to go straight off through the gravel and into the barriers at high speed.
Although he was thankful the issue didn’t happen at Hawthorn Bend, Sutton admitted “being a passenger” and having a high speed issue out of the blue was not a nice feeling.
“I think there’s only one other corner where it’d be worse and that’s Hawthorns!
“It was bad enough at Paddock. It’s not nice being a passenger of your own car that’s for sure. It was completely out of the blue, I literally let off the throttle and we just carried on going straight on.”
Ahead of the triple-header of races, Sutton is planning to revert back to a similar setup to the one he ran in FP2, and aiming for wins and podiums tomorrow [30 September].
“The boys are going to have a real thorough check over the car because like I said it was a real mad rush against the time to get it out,” he explained.
“The key thing was getting out, and at least we can now double check everything and hopefully hit the ground running how we left FP2.”
“We’ve just got to make the most of it. We’ve got nothing to lose, we’ll try to get the best result we can and I’d love to come away with a few more race wins and podiums.”
The opening British Touring Car Championship race of the weekend is set to get underway at 11:35 tomorrow.