Ciceley Motorsport’s Adam Morgan was pleased with the fourth fastest time during qualifying for the opening British Touring Car Championship round of the weekend at Thruxton, despite having his best effort disallowed for exceeding track limits.
After two red flags had disrupted the session, Morgan swept to the fastest lap of the session with a 1:16.808s, only for his time to be scrubbed for the track limit infringement.
But the 26 year-old posted another quick lap the next time round to go fastest, only to be usurped by the Hondas of Gordon Shedden and Matt Neal and eventual polesitter Aron Smith.
Speaking to TouringCars.Net after qualifying, Morgan spoke of the moments where he thought he had grabbed pole, but insisted it had been important to stay focused for the remainder of his next lap.
“I came across the line and saw a ’16.8 on the dash and my engineer said ‘that’s it – pole’,” he explained. “Through sector one I thought ‘perfect’, but in sector two he told me it had been disallowed and that I was back in ninth.
“But I just carried on – the car is on rails at the minute – and I managed to do three ’16.9s and the car is absolutely flying; it’s really good.”
Neal and Shedden had looked impressive during qualifying in their pair of Civics, but Morgan, who carries considerably less ballast than the pair going into tomorrow’s first race, was confident about his chances of advancing in the opening encounter, having been encouraged by his Mercedes A-Class’ race run earlier on Saturday.
“The Hondas are carrying quite a bit of weight and they can still manage to get a lap time out of it. The benefit for us is that we’ve got slightly less weight than the people around us and our race pace seemed pretty strong in FP1 so hopefully we’ll be able to keep the tyres until the end of the race.
“I think we can be pushing for a podium,” he continued. “Certainly in the first race, and then we [would] get the weight in the second but if we can just stay out of trouble for the first couple of corners, latch onto the back of the Hondas, our race pace and tyre degradation is pretty good so hopefully we can be there at the end to pick a few off.”