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British Touring Car Championship
Oulton Park - Qualifying - 6/6/15

By MJP Media | 6 June 2015

Jason Plato continues his domination of Oulton Park by claiming pole position for the 1st race of the day tomorrow having topped the time sheets in the earlier practice sessions.

Jason Plato dominated all of today's BTCC sessions

Having earlier said that it was too easy to read much into free practice sessions, Jason Plato proved that in this case, actions speak louder than words. In an utterly dominant day for the Team BMR driver, Plato topped the time sheets in every session of the day whilst claiming the 48th BTCC pole position of his illustrious career by the narrowest of margins. In doing so, he set a new qualifying lap record for the Oulton Park circuit.

Behind Plato by just 1/100th of a second was Honda Yuasa Racing's Matt Neal who had been 10th and 8th in the earlier sessions, representing a good step forward for the team. Andy Priaulx kept his good earlier performances going as he was able to hang on to Matt Neal's coat tails with the top 3 drivers being within 1/10th of a second of each other.

Matt Neal will join Jason Plato on the front row of the grid

Andrew Jordan had also been looking on the pace with his MG 888 Racing MG 6GT in the practice sessions and was able to convert that into 4th place for the grid for race 1 tomorrow on exactly the same time as Gordon Shedden in the second Honda Yuasa Racing Civic with a 1:25.937 who took 5th place. Jordan was able to take the higher place based on the rule that where times are equal, the place goes to the driver who set the time earlier in the session.

With Colin Turkington in 6th place, this gave us a top 6 on the grid who are all former Touring Car champions in either the British or World series and all former race winners in the BTCC. Aron Smith, Jack Goff, Tom Ingram and Adam Morgan rounded out the top 10.

Aron Smith goes public on his engagement to Lauren

Overall, the top 12 cars were all within one second a lap of each other and this should provide fantastically close racing tomorrow. Perhaps the most disappointed driver today will be Rob Collard in his JCT600 Racing with GardX BMW 125i M Sport who despite normally being bang on the pace was down in a lowly 19th place. No doubt the disappointment of this result will have been tempered slightly by his son Ricky, who once again won in one of the support series races.

As we look forward to tomorrow's racing, we couldn't help but notice that Aron Smith has finally gone public to announce that he has become engaged to Lauren after proposing to her on their recent holiday. The news has been top secret until this weekend when it is declared lovingly on the back of Aron's Team BMR Volkswagen CC. The action starts at lunchtime tomorrow and we will have the best of the action for you as it happens.

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