With 90 seconds of the qualifying session for Round 10 of the 2007 Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship at Croft remaining, Darren Turner was on pole position – but then Gordon Shedden and Colin Turkington posted faster times. Darren isn’t disappointed, as his record of qualifying within the top three places this year continues, and he has a great chance to win SEAT Sport UK’s 100th BTCC race on Sunday afternoon.

It was a great performance by Darren, particularly as he hasn’t driven at Croft since 1998 and he had to pull out of his final flying lap after “a moment” at Tower Bend.

By virtue of leading the Championship, Jason Plato’s identical SEAT Leon was carrying 45kgs of success ballast, and his prediction of qualifying six-tenths of a second behind his team-mate was spot on.

DRIVER QUOTES

Jason Plato: “That’s the best I could do to be honest. We can see from the data that I’m losing sixth-tenths of a second down the straights and it’s all down to the extra weight. There is nothing we can do about it, so I’m not complaining as I qualified exactly where I thought I would do. We improved the Leon in both free practice sessions and found a good set-up for qualifying. Now we have a good race day strategy and as soon as some of the weight is taken off after the first race we will have a good chance to be up there fighting at the front.”

Darren Turner: “I shouldn’t be pleased to have qualified third, but I am. We had a real problem with rear grip this morning which caused snap oversteer and our data engineer, Karen Suter, found it. The car’s working fine now, but if it wasn’t for her and we’d had this problem all weekend it would have been a nightmare. It’s been a good day’s work and we’ve qualified within spitting distance of pole on a track I’ve not been at for nine years.”