James Pickford set the fastest time of all three SEAT drivers during qualifying for Round 19 of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship at Snetterton today, only to have his times cruelly scrapped minutes before the end of the session for failing to stop at the weighbridge as he came into the pits. Clutch and differential problems caused Jason Plato to be three-tenths of a second slower in qualifying than he had been in free practice. It cost him a slot on the second row of the grid as he qualified in 8th position, behind Luke Hines in 7th.

On great form despite never having driven a saloon car around Snetterton before, James was lying 6th quickest before he came into the pits and misinterpreted the signal to stop at the weighbridge. His failure to stop saw all his previous lap times deleted and with only a few minutes left before the end of the session he was unable to complete another flying lap.

Luke improved on his best free practice time by three-tenths of a second this afternoon by finding more time on used tyres as opposed to his new ones. Confident of a good race set-up he’s looking forward to some more close racing tomorrow.

Jason said: “I honestly don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I’m sure something in the drive train’s gone strange. The car’s just undriveable and we’ve only made a couple of small changes since this morning. It feels to me like something’s broken in the diff, something was very very strange during that session. I jumped on the brakes and couldn’t turn the steering wheel, it just locked solid and then I’d jump on the brakes and not be able to push the clutch down. The problem is you get into a rhythm when you’re driving a car and then when something just stops working you lose that rhythm completely. I couldn’t slow down, I couldn’t turn in - it’s very weird. We need to have a good look at the data but something has definitely broken.”

James said: “Towards the end of the session I pulled into the pits and I didn’t really see the lights until I was just next to them and then I thought to myself ‘what does it mean?’ I didn’t know whether it was red light go to the weighbridge or green light go to the weighbridge, so I got on the radio to ask what I was supposed to do but by that point I was past the point of no return. Because I didn’t stop they’ve taken all my times from the session. I’m really annoyed because up until that point the car was going okay, we had a bit more understeer than we did this morning in free practice but I would have been the top SEAT quite easily. It’s just a pain in the arse that I’ve made a mistake and really paid for it.”

Luke said: “That was a bit of a disappointing session really compared to where we were in free practice this morning. I do think that we’ve got a good race set-up and we’re good on tyres on race set-up so I’m not too worried about tomorrow, it’s just unfortunate that we’re all further down the grid than where we want to be. I went nearly three-tenths quicker this afternoon than I did this morning but it just wasn’t enough to put me towards the top end of the grid.”