Jack Goff secured pole by the extremely narrow margin of only 0.001 seconds over Tom Ingram, as the TOCA-Swindon engines reigned supreme around the flat-out Silverstone circuit.
The Eurotech Honda driver had to overcome three of his laptimes being deleted for track infringement violations, including one which would have put him a tenth clear of Ingram, on his way to pole, a trend which continued throughout the field.
With many drivers running wide out of Copse, Brooklands and kerb-cutting at Woodcote, the stewards were out in full force with driving standards warnings and even black flags.
Both Brett Smith and Jason Plato set times good enough for six place, only to have them subsequently deleted for breaching track limits. Their other laptimes were good enough for 9th and 11th respectively, but Plato was caught abusing track limits enough times for stewards to black flag the former BTCC champion and force him to sit out the last five minutes of the session. Stewart Lines was given a similar treatment.
Matt Neal took advantage of the majority of factory cars being heavily laden with ballast to go fourth quickest, a tenth off the pace of Adam Morgan, who followed on from his excellent pace in Free Practice 2 to secure third.
Another driver who mirrored his FP2 performance was Jake Hill, only one hundredth of a second slower than Neal ahead, and beating fellow independent runners Rob Austin and Ant Whorton-Eales for the fifth fastest time.
Sandwiching Smith in 9th place were championship protagonists Colin Turkington and Ashley Sutton, the pair held back by 66kg and 75kg of performance ballast respectively for both qualifying and Race 1 tomorrow. Championship outsider Gordon Shedden was not far off the pair in 12th, though Rob Collard‘s hopes of a title fightback were hurt by placing his BMW back in 22nd.
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