Ash Sutton ‘not going to give up’ despite slim title odds

Ash Sutton insists he is ‘not going to give up’ despite seeing his chances of a fifth British Touring Car Championship title slip further away in a wet weekend at Silverstone.

Sutton went into the penultimate weekend of the year knowing that he would need to outscore rivals Jake Hill and Tom Ingram to stand a realistic chance of going to Brands Hatch in with a shout of the title.

An uncharacteristic struggle in qualifying on Saturday, when Sutton failed to progress beyond Q1 for the first time this season after a lack of pace in the dry, saw the NAPA Racing UK driver facing the prospect of lining up in 14^th for the opening race on Sunday.

“We couldn’t extract the performance out of the car in qualifying,” said Sutton to TouringCars.Net. “In FP2 we were in 12^th without putting the soft tyre on. We put the softs on at the end of the session and we found three and a half or four tenths just from that.

“The time we could have potentially done would have put us top six at that point. I would have been quite happy with that.

“Pace-wise that should have been enough to get us through into at least Q2, but I just didn’t seem to have the car under me when we put a new tyre on.”

Sutton managed to climb eight places at the start of the opening race on Sunday, and was then helped further when team-mate Daniel Rowbottom and Speedworks’ Josh Cook came together in front a few laps later.

Taking the chequered flag in fourth, Sutton limited the damage to his title challenge, before things quickly unravelled in race two.

Despite jumping up to third at the start, Sutton was quickly handed a drive-through penalty after his mechanics had worked to fix a radio problem for a fraction too long on the starting grid.

Sutton thus took the finish in a lowly 12^th, and despite the best efforts of Rowbottom to give him a chance to be in the mix for the reverse grid race by dropping back, the 30-year-old would also have to start the final race from the sixth row of the grid.

“We lost all radio in race two, so we did a full cycle of the car to try and reset it,” explained Sutton. “That then led to the mechanical [penalty] for still being on the grid.

“The door got shut when the 30 seconds board was shown. If we were one second the other way, we would have been fine, so it was a real killer in that respect.

“We’ve had our fair share of bad luck this year. Two races at Oulton Park with bodywork issues, Donington race three with a bit of contact and race two today, so we’ve ultimately had four races where we’ve not scored anything.”

Torrential rain came down as the final race was starting, but that did not deter Sutton, who gained half a dozen places on the opening lap and was up to third by the end of the second tour.

Conditions continued to worsen though, with several drivers aquaplaning off the circuit, and the race was soon suspended for half an hour – a decision which Sutton felt was the right one.

“They made the right call in terms of the red flag and bringing it to a stop. It was torrential – there was aquaplaning. Where I was, I was happy doing what we were doing, but it probably wouldn’t have been as nice a bit further back.

“When we got back running again the track was completely different. It was like it was back to normal and there was no question about going racing at all then.”

At the resumption of the race, the reigning champion quickly passed Cook for second, and despite trading fastest laps with leader Tom Ingram for several laps to close the gap, and then making a last lap lunge on the Hyundai driver, Sutton had to settle for second.

It means he is 33 points adrift of joint series leaders Hill and Ingram going into next weekend’s finale, but Sutton insists he isn’t ready to give up on his title hopes.

“It’s very hard. We need a lot of lady luck. If it was just one person we could potentially still have a say – we’d potentially need a DNF and a very bad result for it to happen. But for that to happen to two of our rivals would be very unlikely.

“I’m not going to give up. We’ve just got to do the best job we can in qualifying and ultimately just keep taking points out of them.

“This year’s been a bit of a tough ride. We’ve just lacked a little bit of pace, but I feel like at Donington we got our head around the issues and unfortunately it might have ended up being a bit too late in the season.”