Colin Turkington scored a comfortable second win of the season at Croft, as the former BTCC champion beat Matt Neal and Gordon Shedden to victory in the opening race of the day.
Click here for the full Round 13 results.
Starting on the soft tyre, Turkington was never challenged during the race and took his 21st BTCC victory by an impressive 9.334 seconds. The Honda Yuasa duo of Neal and Shedden finished second and third, unable to challenge Turkington on their harder-compound tyres.
Turkington’s WSR team-mate Nick Foster had a strong drive to fourth, passing Jason Plato with relative ease on lap 12.
“It’s a great race result and I’m really pleased with race one,” said Foster to TouringCars.Net. “We all went with the soft tyre option and we’ll find out in race two which one is quicker really.
“I could see that I was catching him [Plato] where he was struggling and I knew that going into Clervaux that was an area where he struggled to turn in. I took a slightly wider line and a bit of kerb to tuck up the inside. I was a little bit surprised that it happened on the first attempt but I’ll take that and move on!”
MG’s Plato had to settle for fifth, ahead of the Pirtek Honda of Andrew Jordan in sixth. Sam Tordoff finished in seventh, having made little progress from his grid position during the race.
An impressive eighth was Michael Caine on his return to the BTCC, whilst Rob Collard put in a strong drive to finish in ninth after being spun around at the opening corner of the race following contact from Plato. Tom Onslow-Cole completed the top ten, after the Team HARD driver was muscled out of eighth with just three corners to go by Caine.
Mat Jackson clipped the tyre stack at Clervaux and was forced to retire from the race with damage to his left-rear wheel on lap six. Speedworks’ Ollie Jackson also failed to finish the race after suffering from engine problems on his Toyota.
Round 14 takes place at 14:37 BST (15:37 CEST).