British Touring Car Championship leader Ash Sutton extended his points advantage at Snetterton with a storming drive to victory in race two from 10th on the grid.
It swung the advantage firmly back in the four-time champion’s direction, with Tom Ingram retiring from the race with an apparent car malaise with two and a half laps remaining. It means that Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus Titanium pilot Sutton now leads the reigning champion and his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback by 48 points.
Sutton had been promoted one position in the race one results due to the exclusion of team-mate Sam Osborne for overboosting, and he made his way up two positions to eighth on the opening lap – including a daring move around the outside of Tom Chilton at Coram.
Meanwhile, Ingram passed race one victor Charles Rainford’s West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport at the hairpin on the second lap, and sprinted away in the lead. These two, plus third-placed Daryl De Leon’s WSR BMW, were all running medium compound Goodyear tyres in this race, while all but two of the rest of the field were on softs.
Sutton passed Josh Cook on the second lap, Dan Rowbottom on the third, and then set fastest lap on the fourth as he homed in on the leading soft-tyred runners.
Leading them was Cammish, who was puzzlingly struggling to clear the fading De Leon. But he had endured a severe vibration on his lap to the grid, forcing the Alliance mechanics into a last-gasp change of brake pads and discs before the race.
Tom Ingram, Team VERTU
Photo by: JEP
Eventually Cammish passed De Leon, and half a lap later both Sutton and Ricky Collard swamped the BMW as they raced up the start-finish straight, Sutton making up two positions to fourth in one move. He then got ahead of Cammish into the esses, and as the race moved into its second half he slipped in front of Rainford at the hairpin.
Now Sutton was second, but he soon slashed into the gap to Ingram. The Hyundai man moved to the middle of the road to defend into the hairpin, but locked up and slithered wide, dropping to fifth.
Three laps later, Ingram coasted to a halt on the exit of the esses, parking the Hyundai on the grass just before the Bomb Hole.
Collard, meanwhile, made a superb move around the outside of Cammish into the esses to move his Excelr8 Hyundai into second. Chilton got past the Ford driver at the same spot the following lap to complete an Excelr8 2-3.
Up front, Sutton was clear, taking the chequered flag 6.009s ahead of Collard, and completing a comeback from starting the day at the back of the grid for race one.
“We knew race one was going to be tough,” he said. “It was a two-race plan to get back to the podium, and the balance wasn’t where we wanted it in the first. But we made some big changes and it worked. Everyone was fair, it was mega racing. Tom was a sitting duck, and once he’d sailed on it made my life a lot easier.”
Tom Ingram, Team VERTU
Sutton was given a five-second penalty after the race for ‘obtaining an unfair advantage, whether inadvertently or not’ for the double pass on Collard and De Leon, but such was his margin that it did not affect his win. However, had Collard not backed off on the run to the finish line, it could have been a close-run thing.
Plato Racing’s pair of Mercedes A35 Saloons both finished in the top six, with Adam Morgan getting ahead of Dan Rowbottom on the penultimate lap for fifth.
Rowbottom just outsprinted a fast-closing Gordon Shedden, whose Speedworks Motorsport-run Laser Tools Toyota Corolla GR Sport will start the reversed-grid finale from pole position.
Rainford and De Leon faded to eighth and 10th respectively, sandwiching the Restart Racing Hyundai of Chris Smiley.
BTCC Snetterton – Race 2 results
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– The Autosport.com Team
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