Turkington's Missed Chance As Sutton Digs Deep

An unexpected twist of fortunes ensured points leader Sutton held his advantage.

- Jack Cozens

For the best part of an hour last Sunday afternoon, Ash Sutton appeared to have handed his chief rival Colin Turkington a route back to the summit of the British Touring Car Championship standings at exactly the wrong moment.

The pair had finished nose-to-tail in third and fourth in race two but, crucially, with Sutton ahead after an opportunistic move at Luffield on the final lap while Turkington was bottled up behind Tom Ingram. Unfairly so, said the stewards, who reversed the positions and sent Sutton to the back of the race-three grid for his third strike of the year – a decision that stood after an appeal from Team BMR.

Fourth and (an inherited) third-place finishes in races one and two had allowed Turkington to nibble into Sutton’s lead. And with his WSR BMW starting the third race from sixth – 24 places ahead of Sutton’s Subaru – the odds suggested that Turkington might well take a bigger bite out of Sutton’s advantage, or even turn it into one of his own.

So fancied was such an outcome that few considered the opposite scenario;but on a muddled BTCC weekend, that’s exactly what happened, as Turkington encountered trouble while Sutton cut his way through the field.

Having sat in the leading pack on the run down the Wellington Straight, Turkington received a tap at Brooklands and, after surviving a sideways moment, plummeted to 21st in the order. Mired in the midfield, things got no better and one lap later his race was all but written off.