Ashley Sutton said that he and MG team-mate Josh Cook had agreed to fight until the end for victory in the opening Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship race of the day at Silverstone.
The Croft winner added his second BTCC victory of the season in the 25th round at the Northamptonshire circuit, fighting back from a poor start from pole position to grab a lead from Tom Ingram on lap seven at Luffield that he would not lose.
“We’ve had a really strong weekend so far”, Sutton told The Checkered Flag afterwards. “We couldn’t ask for more so far.
“We didn’t get the best start, but fought our way back through. We had the pace, so it was about finding that gap from Tom to get by.”
After Triple Eight‘s first one-two finish since October 2014, Sutton said that victory in race two will be tough to replicate with the softer Dunlop tyres and 75kg of success ballast in his MG6 GT.
“It’s the first time that I’ve ever used the 75kg”, Sutton added ahead of the second race of the day. “I’ve got the hardest bit out of the way. This is going to be interesting and, with the soft tyres, it’s probably not going to be ideal.
“After you put it on pole, everybody expects you to win. After I dropped into second, I knew we had the pace to go forward and get back to the front.“
Sutton did however have a brief scare in the latter stages of the 22-lap race when team-mate Cook made an attack for the lead at Brooklands, both surviving contact as Sutton retained the top spot.
Commenting on the incident in question, Sutton said that both were keen to race each other, adding: “At the end of the day, I won’t lie – we had a few words before that we would fight to the end.
“Josh obviously stuck his nose up the inside to show that he was coming; at that point I was looking after the tyres, but after that I was out of there.”
Cook himself spoke on the incident, telling TCF: “We’re there to race each other, but not to take each other out. There was a gap there, I had the pace and it would have been the same with anybody else.”
