Yvan Muller showed he is out to make up for the misfortune he suffered last time out at Mondello Park, setting the quickest time in free practice at Brands Hatch. Lapping in a time of 49.478 seconds, the Frenchman was just two thousandths of a second quicker than Honda Racing’s Matt Neal went in the day’s earlier session.

Defending champion and current championship leader, James Thompson, was 8th fastest in the second session of the day, but fans of the VX Racing driver should not worry too much as he cited “saving tyres” as the reason for being further down the timesheet.

Team PSP’s David Leslie made an improvement of more than three tenths of a second between sessions, commenting, “We are making progress, but just not as quickly as we would like. Development on the car is still going and there is more to come. I think we may struggle in qualifying here, like at Mondello, but hopefully we’ll be more competitive come raceday.”

Fastest Independent driver of the day was Rob Collard in his Astra Coupe, ahead of Scot Gavin Pyper. Collard said “We had a couple of good results at Mondello and we’re just hoping to continue that this weekend. The target is to take two Independents wins and then to build on the top-six finish we had in the first race.”

“We’re still running a 2001 spec-engine in the car, but we’ve got an updated version which will be in the car in time for Thruxton. Hopefully that should give us an extra 10bhp and put us on a level footing with Gavin, and a bit closer to the works drivers.”

In the Production class, Michael Bentwood set the pace in his Edenbridge Racing BMW 320i, ahead of Luke Hines and Tom Boardman.

Qualifying for round three of the championship takes place at 15:00 on Sunday, with the grid for round four being decided by the result of the first race.