A-Tech Motorsport drivers David Pinkney and Richard Marsh will line up in 17th and 26th places respectively on the grid for tomorrow’s first Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) race at Brands Hatch after this afternoon’s qualifying session at the Kent circuit.

Both drivers were unable to conduct any testing mileage in the run up to the first round of the BTCC due to their Alfa Romeo 156 cars arriving this week from Italy. Therefore, they found themselves battling to find a comfortable set-up on the 1.2-mile Brands Hatch ‘Indy’ circuit today.

At the end of this afternoon’s 45-minute qualifying session, Pinkney emerged as the fastest A-Tech driver having placed his Super 2000-specification machine in 17th place. However, the Harpenden driver admitted the set-up on his car wasn’t entirely to his liking.

“That was a very tough session and we’ve obviously got a lot more work to do when it comes to fully understanding the car, but that’s the situation you find yourself in when you’re not able to do any testing before the first race,” he said. “We need to improve the handling for tomorrow and there are a few things that we can change to reach that target.”

Meanwhile, Marsh was only able to complete four qualifying laps after the set-up changes that he applied to his car after this morning’s free practice sessions, didn’t work out.

The 39-year-old said: “We applied some settings that were given to us by N Technology (the preparations company that built the Alfa cars in Italy) but they run to different regulations in the world championship and the changes didn’t quite work. We therefore decided to get the car through the minimum laps and get the it back to the pits to get prepared for tomorrow.”

A-Tech team principal, Julian Griffin, said the team would be applying a “comfortable set-up” to both of its cars for tomorrow’s three races.

“The Alfa is notoriously hard to set up and when the drivers haven’t driven it before, you’re fighting an uphill battle,” he said. “But there are things we can do to make the cars more driveable for tomorrow and we hope those changes will offer an improvement in speed and handling.”