Photo: PSP Images

Andy Priaulx leads home West Surrey Racing 1-2-3 at Croft

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Andy Priaulx took his first victory since his BTCC return as he led home a West Surrey Racing 1-2-3, and his first touring car win since 2010.

The West Surrey trio held the top three positions from the very first lap, with Rob Collard getting the jump on Gordon Shedden from the second row and they never looked back from there.

Sam Tordoff held the lead for the first few tours of the Croft circuit, before Priaulx made his move on lap six at Tower after Tordoff made a slight mistake out of the chicane. The three then cruised to a comfortable victory for the BMW team, the first ever 1-2-3 result for West Surrey Racing. Gordon Shedden held on to the back for the majority of the race, but was never able to put a serious challenge with his 66kg of success ballast in the Honda Civic Type-R.

There were few major position changes in the opening stages of the race, but once the race reached the final third the drivers carrying soft tyres appeared to suffer some significant drop off.

The most noticeable sufferers of the soft tyre going away was Rob Austin, who had spent the first ten laps holding sixth and keeping Matt Neal at bay. However, by the drop of the chequered flag at the end of lap 15, Austin was down in 13th. Jack Goff suffered a similar fate, ending the race in tenth after battling with Neal and teammate Andrew Jordan in the opening laps.

Colin Turkington also had a bad end to his race, dropping from fifth to seventh in the final lap, almost dropping to eighth before coming together with Tom Ingram at the final corner, causing the latter to spin off, although Ingram was still able to finish in eighth.

Elsewhere, Jason Plato decided to start the race from the pitlane, seemingly aiming to set some fast times in clear air on the soft tyre. His fastest lap was good enough to see the Team BMR Volkswagen line up in third for race two.

As a result of Plato finishing out of the points, he has now dropped to third in the points standings, with Gordon Shedden and Matt Neal filling the top two spots for Honda Racing Team.