Despite putting in some really quick laps at the end of Saturday’s BTCC qualifying session, Honda Racing’s Matt Neal had to settle for second on the grid for Sunday’s two races.

Neal was just 0.166 seconds behind James Thompson when the session timed out and with Thompson going a second under his own lap record, the pace was certainly hot - even if the weather was a little indifferent. Heavy rain in the morning ruined the first free practice, leaving all the teams frantically trying to find a working set-up during the second session.

Alan Morrison struggled through the morning with a small problem on his Honda Civic Type R. His technicians worked hard during the dry second practice and their efforts paid dividends when the tough Ulsterman knocked a full second off his lap time right at the close of qualifying.

Honda Racing’s youngest driver Tom Chilton was going well but mistimed his braking on his fast lap, locking up the front wheels and spoiling his assault on the front row.

Matt Neal: “Obviously I’m over the moon to be on the front row, but at the same time I’m pretty disappointed to have missed out on pole. We’ve been struggling with a slight set-up problem which didn’t reveal itself in the horrible conditions this morning, but as soon as we went a bit faster in the dry it reared its ugly head. We thought we’d sorted it but it was a bit of a rush job and it still caused trouble in qualifying. If we’d been able to fix it, I reckon I could have made P1 for Honda Racing. We need to get our heads together tonight but I’m confident that we’ll have it sorted for the race.”

Alan Morrison: “We’ve been working hard to close the gap on Vauxhall, who have been to Silverstone more times than us and know their way around better. But we’ve got three cars here, all running with different settings and that helped us work out an excellent race set-up.”

Tom Chilton: “That was an interesting session. We made loads of changes during the day while we hunted for a good race set-up. I’m sure I could have done a faster lap but I made a bad tyre choice. I had the option of changing all four tyres or just the fronts and I decided to just switch the fronts, which turned out to be the wrong choice. It takes three laps to get the hard tyres we use here working well and by the time the fronts came in the rears had gone. Then again, eighth isn’t bad and we have the Honda Civic Type R going so well here that I’m confident for the races.”