Ash Sutton can’t wait to get back into the heat of BTCC battle at Snetterton this weekend, having reignited his title defence at Croft.
Two wins and a seventh at the Yorkshire circuit saw the reigning champion go into the summer break on a high, and the Essex-based racer is looking forward to a “very, very interesting” weekend that could make or break his hopes of mounting a serious championship bid.
“You can never beat being in a racecar,” he said. “I’ve always been a racer and I’m looking forward to getting back behind the wheel racing rather than doing laps testing, and trying to pick up some silverware.”
Double points on offer this weekend…
Sutton lies 51 points behind Colin Turkington but, with double points on offer in the 60-mile BTCC Diamond Jubilee race three, all things remain possible.
“It could turn the season around or it could knock us out completely,” he said, ahead of the announcement that he will be racing in commemorative livery this weekend to mark the 60th anniversary celebrations.
“I think it’s going to be very, very interesting and it could be a turning point for a lot of people.
If you have a bad race suddenly you could be a lot of points down which could take a few races to recoup.
“For me to maximise the opportunity we need to have everything set up perfectly and hope our rivals have a bad race in that race.”
Expectations for Snetterton…
Sutton expects the 20-lap race, eight laps longer than usual, to favour the rear wheel drive cars.
“If the weather is hot, the front wheel drive cars are more likely to fall away at the end, and the extra eight laps should, in theory, see them struggle even more when it comes to the end,” he said.
“It doesn’t mean we’ve got it easy, we still have to look after our rear tyres – if we burn them up we’ll be in a similar situation, but our tyre wear should be more even.”
This time last year, Sutton took the first two races at the Norfolk circuit, a feat he repeated at Croft in June.
But he doesn’t expect things to be quite so straightforward this time around, thanks largely to the Subaru Levorg’s lack of straight line speed compared to 12 months ago.
“Croft was very much tailored to us, suited to us, and suddenly we go to a track that’s a lot bigger, a lot more straights involved and not so abrasive on the tyres, so there’s three negatives straight away compared with Croft,” he added.
“But things can change and you never know where we could end up. We’ll be lucky to get the same sort of results as last year, but that’s always the aim – we’ll always be trying for that.”
A productive two-days of testing
Two solid days testing complete, lots of positives! Onto the race in a few weeks!
📸: @jakobebrey
🔵⚪️#AS1 pic.twitter.com/kdlCJy52bb
— Ashley Sutton (@ASuttonRacing) July 12, 2018
Sutton and the Team BMR engineers spent two days testing at the Norfolk circuit earlier in July as part of the Dunlop tyre testing session.
“We did a lot of development work with the car, which was always going to be the main aim of the test,” he said.
“We had a long list of things we wanted to rattle through and get some answers from. It was two days spent trying to move the car forward and see if we could find anything we’ve missed previously in testing.
“I believe we made progress, but we won’t really know until we get to qualifying, where we will get a true reading of how close we are.”
Saturday’s qualifying is live on ITV online at 3.05pm and 5.35pm, with racing live on ITV4 from 10.30am on Sunday.
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