Dan Cammish beats BMWs to top spot in second practice

Dan Cammish showed that rear wheel drive cars might not have it all their own way at Croft after topping second free practice ahead of the fourth round of the BTCC season.

The Team Dynamics driver set the fastest time to date on the resurfaced circuit to lap nearly two seconds under the existing qualifying lap record at the North Yorkshire circuit, laying down an early marker at the wheel of his Honda Civic Type R for the others to chase.

As it was, a time of 1:21.496 would prove to be unbeatable despite the best efforts of Andrew Jordan, who had earlier topped the times in FP1 at the wheel of his WSR-run BMW. Jordan would manage to get within a tenth of a second of the quickest time and was half a second quicker than he had been earlier in the day, but ultimately had to settle for second place.

Points leader Colin Turkington was third quickest in the second of the BMWs ahead of Sam Tordoff, who missed the latter stages of the session after clattering a tyre stack at the Jim Clark Esses having just set a personal best first sector in his AmD-run Honda.

Jacon Plato and Matt Neal followed behind to round out the top six, with Stephen Jelley edging ahead of Tom Oliphant in his older BMW 125i M Sport.

Ash Sutton and Rory Butcher rounded out the top ten.

As in FP1, a large number of drivers dipped below the previous lap records, with no fewer than 24 beating the previous qualifying mark. All 30 drivers bettered the race lap record, including Excelr8’s Rob Smith, who earlier missed FP1 for breaking the rules regarding testing after an appearance in a club level event at the circuit earlier this month.