Ronan Pearson enjoys ‘relaxed’ best-ever qualifying session

Ronan Pearson was ‘really chilled’ after equalling his best-ever qualifying result in the British Touring Car Championship season opener at Donington Park.

In his first competitive session for the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota team, Pearson ended the day as the best of the Corolla drivers after getting through to Q3 for only the second time in his touring car career.

Emulating his best-ever performance achieved at the same circuit almost exactly one year earlier, Pearson was just over a second from pole as he qualified in fifth for Sunday’s opening race.

“It was good, it felt really chilled,” said Pearson to TouringCars.Net. “Not being sure where we’d be until this point, as it’s always Q1 of Round 1 where you find out where everybody is at, we delivered a real strong result.

“The session was pretty relaxed and I just wanted to go out, do my best and put together a really good lap, and we did.

“I was fifth at Donington here last year and we had a real strong start to the year, so to emulate that is really nice.”

Pearson is trying to use his season and a half of experience to improve his performance, and says that he’s ‘doing his own thing’ within the Toyota team, which has a completely changed driver line-up this year.

“I’m still learning, but I’m using everything from the last couple of years to make decisions and calls on things – how I bring the tyre in is even a little bit different.

“It’s put me in good stead and it’s going to be a learning season, really. We’ve got a good handle on the setup and its coming.

“We’ve all got our own directions and you can delve into those to work out who’s getting on best with what, but me and my engineer are working really well and we’re doing our own thing.

“We’ve gone backwards at points and we’ve gone forward at points. Today we’ve kept on with the same plan from the start and it’s proven to be good.

“Three points finishes on Sunday would be nice. Like today, having no real expectation meant we could deliver a strong result.

“Some nice points in the three races tomorrow would be quite satisfying.”