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Ash Sutton placed The NAPA Racing UK Ford on pole position at Snetterton after “just reaping the benefits of all the development”. Despite saying this, he was clear of everybody let alone his teammates.
Sutton said at the end of Brands that he had ‘never felt more confident in a touring car’ and that confidence shined in qualifying at Snetterton.
“I mean you just turn up in a better mindset. Yeah, the car’s on absolute rails, it’s mega,” said Sutton to TouringCars.Net. “So I can’t fault the car, I can’t fault what the guys are doing behind me.
“NAPA Racing UK, they’ve been supportive of, shall we say, the tough times at the start of the year when luck wasn’t on our side. So now we’re just reaping the benefits of all the development, all the hard work that everyone’s been putting in.”
The weekend started as well as Sutton could have hoped having finished the opening session 0.666 seconds ahead of the field. Even after all the confidence boosts he has had, he was just pleased they had done the lap time.
“Don’t get me wrong, it does fill you with confidence, but it’s FP1, it’s irrelevant, you don’t know what people are really doing. Obviously we were pleased with the time we did, ultimately it’s only four tenths slower than what we just went and done.
“You go into FP2, you kind of get an idea again of what people are up to, but until you actually get out and put a new set of tyres on and have a stab at it, then that’s the real true reading of where you stand. So yeah, it’s nice to be able to still stay at the top and fulfil what we saw in FP1.”
Even after how well these last couple of weeks have been for Sutton, he does not believe that the Sunday will be plain sailing. The three-time champion puts that down to the three tyre choices.
“We’re going to have to be clever about it I think. We’re in a very good place to maximise points, so we need to make sure we do that.
“But at some point we could be racing someone on a soft whilst on a hard, so the racing is going to be difficult and we’ll have to wait and see.”