Triple Eight Racing and Josh Cook started quickest in a shortened first practice session for the second Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship meeting of the season at Donington Park.
The 40-minute session started slowly as runners lapped the 1.98-mile circuit around two seconds slower than Jason Plato‘s 2014 lap record, cars bedding in during the first half of proceedings.
Closest to that time was Motorbase Performance’s Mat Jackson, but his effort was trimmed to a time of 1m11.226s by the MG6 GT of Cook, just before a red flag interruption.
The issues were for Eurotech Racing‘s brace of Honda Civic Type-R machines, Jeff Smith and Martin Depper running into problems at Old Hairpin.
No significant improvements were made on the restart until Cook lowered his effort further to a 1m10.985s, a time that would remain quickest as a second stoppage to remove the Speedworks Motorsport Honda Civic Type R of Matt Simpson from the Old Hairpin ended the session.
Cook was 0.045s quicker than Gordon Shedden‘s Halfords Honda, Jackson almost half a second adrift while Team BKR‘s Aron Smith and Team BMR‘s Colin Turkington rounded out the top five.
Behind the Subaru man was championship leader, Matt Neal, while the top 10 was rounded out by Andrew Jordan (Ford), the impressive Jake Hill (Toyota), Ashley Sutton (MG) and Rob Collard (BMW).
Rob Austin was the only man not to set a time in the session, the field reduced to 31 cars in the build-up to Donington Park after Andy Neate’s departure from Honda.
