Ash Sutton shines again but Subaru vows “no stone unturned” to improve

Team BMR boss Warren Scott has vowed that his Subaru squad will leave ‘no stone unturned’ as it bids to fight back from a tough start to the BTCC season.

Jason Plato, James Cole and Josh Price all failed to trouble the scorers at Thruxton on another challenging weekend for the rear-wheel drive Levorg, although Ash Sutton was able to battle his way to three top eight finishes to maintain eighth place in the championship standings.

The pace, or lack of, at BMR has been one of the main talking points of the season so far, and Scott admitted that results to this point hadn’t been good enough.

“It has been an immensely difficult start to the season after what seemed to be a very encouraging, comprehensive pre- season test programme for everybody at Adrian Flux Subaru Racing,” he said. “The Subaru Levorg is handling extremely well but the straight line speed deficit is certainly curtailing the efforts from our drivers to be challenging for the championship.

“We are working tirelessly with all parties involved in the control of this and hope that we will have this resolved by Oulton Park. We run an open house policy within the engineering team to share set up and data on both test days and race weekends.

“I am personally extremely disappointed in the results we have at the moment and I intend to leave no stone unturned in an effort to resolve this problem so that we can get the team back on track to winning ways.

“I thank the sponsors and fans for their continued, loyal support at this most challenging time.”

Despite Scott’s disappointment with the season as a whole however, Sutton continued to provide the team with some reason to cheer after another impressive performance on track – which also included setting the fastest lap of the race in race one.

The reigning Jack Sears Trophy winner admitted that there was still more to come from the package as BMR works to resolve some of the issues it currently faces, with the aim being to take steps forwards as a team at Oulton Park next time out.

“I’m pleased with my results as we’ve had another strong weekend but this isn’t a rear-wheel drive track despite the results for Colin [Turkington] and Rob [Collard],” he said. “We were quickest amongst the RWD cars in qualifying and led the way in race one which was good for us, and we got solid points on the board.

“I was really living on the edge and pulling out moves people wouldn’t do, which is what got us the results this weekend. We struggled with the ballast in race two and three, but it was a case of dragging everything I could from the car. We could drive around some issues at Donington Park, but not at Thruxton.

“I think Oulton Park will be better. The boys did well there this year so hopefully we can do the same this year. I’d like to think we can take steps forwards in terms of steering the car in the right direction and then we’ll have to see what we can do on track.”