Slower cars on the racing line were the bane of Jason Plato’s qualifying aspirations at Snetterton today, as the leader of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship had three flying laps ruined by dawdling drivers. Having qualified the same SEAT Leon on pole at Snetterton last year, Jason will line up on the fourth row of the grid for tomorrow’s first of three BTCC races around the fast Norfolk circuit having qualified 8th, while his SEAT Sport UK team-mate Darren Turner will be directly ahead of him on row three after qualifying 6th after traffic problems and “snap oversteer”.

Jason set the fastest time in Free Practice 2 to head into the 30 minute qualifying session with great expectations. Although his car, complete with 45kgs of success ballast, worked well around the 1.95 mile track, circumstances – including the side window collapsing and acting like an air brake during one fast lap – saw it come nowhere near the 1:11.793 it set in qualifying last year.

Darren did well to qualify on the third row, after sitting out all of Free Practice 1 when an electrical sensor failure stranded him out on the circuit during his first lap of the day. He was 9th fastest in the second free practice session and initially held 3rd fastest time in qualifying before a rear handling problem upset the balance of his Leon. As the other drivers around him bettered their times, Darren could not improve and slipped to 6th.

The weather could play an important role on race day. The SEAT Leon demonstrated how competitive it is in wet conditions last time out at Donington Park, when Jason won two out of the three races. The forecast is for heavy overnight rain and a 60% chance of heavy showers throughout Sunday – with a severe weather warning just to the south of the region.

DRIVER QUOTES

Jason Plato: “The way some people were driving, you’d think they were trying to qualify last! Three of my fast laps were completely ruined by slower drivers; I don’t think they did it deliberately, I just don’t think they know what they were doing. It’s very frustrating, because we should be further up the grid. But the most important thing is that we know we have good pace in the car and although we start from the fourth row of the grid, we can race well from there and we have an opportunity to score a lot of Championship points. Let’s just forget about what happened in qualifying and look forward to race day.”

Darren Turner: “I gave Jason a tow during the second free practice session and we found it was worth two-tenths of a second. The plan was to do it again in qualifying on our first set of tyres, but we got held up in slower traffic. I was meant to do three quick laps on my first set of tyres, but my engineer told me to go for another one and, as it turned out, that was when we set our fastest lap. On my second set of tyres I suddenly developed snap oversteer – it was so bad that I thought I had a left-rear puncture, so I came into the pits. The tyre was fine, we suspect now that it might be a damper, but we had the problem for the rest of the session and couldn’t improve our time. The car feels really good around here and I’m comfortable with the pace and our prospects for race day.”