Sutton on the button as he extends his series lead
On current form, it’s hard to see Ash Sutton not claiming the British Touring Car Championship title for a third time this season – or mount a fourth and record-breaking fifth conquest in the years to come. At Thruxton last weekend, he extended his points advantage over current runner-up Tom Ingram from 14 points to 30. On a circuit renowned for not favouring rear-wheel drive, he was once again a race winner in that softly sprung, kerb-leaping Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50.
Last year, there were some errors on Sutton’s part as the championship advantage swung to and fro between him and Colin Turkington. Mistakes are definitely not a part of his game in 2021. As his BMR engineer and Infiniti redesign wizard Antonio Carrozza observed, in the wake of Sutton dragging an Infiniti laden with 75kg of success ballast to seventh on the grid: “With the weight it’s not about race one – that’s just about damage-limitation, and race two is where you maximise things. Ash has spent a lot of his career being the chaser and not often the leader. At this point of his Subaru season [where Sutton won the 2017 title in the BMR Levorg] he was fifth or sixth [and therefore not carrying much ballast].”
What might not have happened last year is Sutton having the discipline to get what Carrozza described as “a good banker in”, which netted him that seventh place in qualifying, and in the more in the car, and Sutton strove to find it. “I would like to have kept P3 or P4 but we were pushing it to do that,” he reflected. “I just had a little bit of wheelspin, which cost me at the Complex.”
