David Sutton took a lights-to-flag victory at Rockingham Motor Speedway in the first of the weekend’s VW Cup races but had to survive a last lap challenge to be assured of victory.
At the start he managed to make a clean getaway and have a clean lap which certainly helped grow out his lead, but his lead was certainly helped whoever it was that tapped Lucas Orrock into a spin at turn one. The KPM Racing driver had started second but span at turn one after a touch – he managed to be avoided by the rest of the very substantial pack thankfully.
He was the first of a couple of incidents on the first lap, one car spun at Tarzan trying to pick their way through the grid with another stranding themselves at the edge of the gravel trap at the end of School Straight. Thankfully neither of these incidents resulted in anything major.
While all this was going on, Sutton was busy capitalising on his lead as Joe McMillen and Joe Fullbrook squabbled for second place behind. Fullbrook would eventually make a lunge in the dying minutes that assured him of the runners up position and a chance of a charge towards Sutton but couldn’t close up fast enough.
Fourth place went to Jason Tingle after one hell of a battle with firstly Chris Panayiotou and then Aaron Mason. Tingle had started on the eighth row but a few laps of cutting through the field saw him in sixth, his move on Panayiotou was relatively simple but his fight with Mason was fierce.
There was a lot of cutting and dicing between the pair in the second half of the race, but when Tingle made the decisive move into fourth, Mason couldn’t respond.
He would have to settle for fifth, ahead of Panayiotou in sixth who will be hoping for better in the pair of races tomorrow.
Lucas Orrock, who was spun into dead last, ended up recovering to ninth place and will be hoping that he can do more in tomorrow’s races to bring back a decent haul of points after his second row start was cruelly ruined before he could make anything happen.
