Ash Sutton has been given a five-place grid penalty for the second British Touring Car Championship race at Oulton Park, after the Subaru driver made contact with Adam Morgan in race one.
Sutton tagged the back of Morgan’s Mercedes on lap 13 whilst the duo were fighting for ninth place, with Sutton making a late lunge at Cascades as he sought to gain an extra position.
The contact was enough to break the left-rear suspension on the A-Class, causing Morgan to retire whilst Sutton went on to finish in eighth after also passing Jason Plato on the penultimate lap.
Sutton told TouringCars.Net that the contact was unintentional, with the 2017 champion immediately going to talk to Morgan to apologise for the incident after the race.
“It’s one of those things,” said Sutton. “I actually went and saw Adam straight away, the moment he got back with the car, and I said ‘look, it was totally unintentional’ and he knew that.
“If you look at the damage that’s on our car, we caught him by 20 mm with our front bumper and it had such a consequence on his car it meant that he couldn’t finish the race.
“We’ve been given a five-place grid penalty for it, but it wasn’t intentional, he knew that and he didn’t go to the bus and protest it, it’s just something the stewards have brought.”
Sutton said the fact that such a light contact had such a big consequence was ‘bad luck’, with the resultant penalty meaning he will start race two from 13th.
“I think it was completely bad luck – I genuinely think that if we hit him in the back of the car a little bit squarer and I’d maybe braked a little bit later, he’d still be circulating.
“The worst bit about it all is that he was going to let me by at the hairpin – he had already said that and had that radio call.
“The only way we can pass at the minute is with the element of surprise and unfortunately that’s the consequence of it.”