Ash Sutton pleased with seventh after only completing one flying lap

NAPA Racing’s Ash Sutton was pleased to qualify in seventh for the opening British Touring Car Championship race at Croft, after only being able to complete one true flying lap in a disrupted session.

Sutton was three tenths away from pole position but put his car in the mix amongst his title rivals for the opening race on Sunday.

Qualifying was red-flagged three times due to various incidents, resulting in less time than usual to post a fast lap time.

Bearing that in mind, Sutton, who had been outside the top ten in both practice sessions, thought his performance was competitive, given the programme he and the team had earlier worked through in practice.

“We’ve had a bit of an odd day,” said Sutton to TouringCars.Net. “We haven’t put any tyres at all on during the day, whereas I know quite a few people did in FP2. That kind of left us in a bit of an unknown.

“Ultimately, I only did one lap in qualifying due to how we were doing our tyre warming and things like that, we just fell wrong with the red flags.

“We did one lap which put us P7, so I’m happy with that. Ultimately, was there any more? I don’t know – we didn’t try and put another lap together, so there could have been a little bit more there. But it was good.

“I’m pleased with it overall – we’ve got a car that feels like it’s in a good place, so we just need to focus on race day now.

“I’m intrigued to see how we fare against everyone. Race one will be the true test – there’s a couple of cars around us with full [hybrid] deployment but we’re limited. Obviously, Tom [Ingram] is further up and he’s limited as well.”

Sutton says the pace shown by Jake Hill last season, where he finished second in race one before winning race two, indicates the Ford Focus can continue to be near the front this year.

“We haven’t got the weight or the ballast that affected the front-wheel drive cars here [in the past]. Look at the performance Jake gave last year – he pretty much pushed Aiden [Moffat] around and finished second.

“I’m not saying we’re going to get second, but it shows the package is strong, so we just need to focus on that and see where we end up after race one and push the car on from there.”