Alex MacDowall has taken his second pole position of the season at Knockhill this afternoon. The Silverline Chevrolet driver pipped pace-setting Gordon Shedden to the fastest time by 0.072 seconds, setting a new qualifying record in the process. Matt Neal made it a strong qualifying session for Honda by setting the third quickest lap.
Click here for the full qualifying results.
With Jason Plato qualifying in fourth it marks the first time since rockingham in 2007 that the works cars locked out the first two rows of the grid. This comes despite Plato carrying the maximum success ballast.
Shedden had been fastest all morning around his local track, so for him to ‘only’ qualify second has left him feeling a little disappointed.
Airwaves BMW’s Steven Kane had his strongest qualifying performance of the year after a last minute lap gave him the fifth fastest time. His performance in qualifying will give the team a massive confidence boost as they have regularly struggled over single lap runs in practice and qualifying.
Paul o’Neill put in another fine lap to qualify sixth fastest – ahead of the two Team Aon drivers who had so comfortably set the pace at Silverstone two weeks ago. Tom Chilton was the fastest Ford driver in seventh, whilst Tom Onslow-Cole – notably carrying 36kg more ballast than Chilton, was eighth just 0.184 seconds further back.
Rob Collard was ninth fastest, although he admitted to being disappointed with that time. “That was quite hard work, the session was a bit disjointed because of the red flag and I didn’t really get into a good rhythm,” said Collard on his Facebook page. “All day I’ve been finding it difficult to get the car over the kerbs quickly. Think I got the most I could out the car but ideally wanted to be in the top eight. We should be in good shape in race trim tomorrow though, so looking forward to getting stuck into the first race.”
Andrew Jordan rounded out the top 10, still less than half a second off the pole position pace.
The session was red flagged brielfy after Andy Neate went off at Duffus Dip and hit the tyre barriers. It meant that Neate would only complete 10 laps in the first half of the session, leaving him unable to improve his time and putting him 17th out of 18 cars on the grid for the first race.
Triple eight and BTCC debutant Jeff smith qualified in 16th for his first BTCC race, just ahead of Neate and Shaun Hollamby.