Chilton hails 'perfect weekend' after race three win

Motorbase Performance's Tom Chilton has reignited his British Touring Car Championship campaign after securing his first victory of the year at Croft.

Chilton endured a miserable weekend last time out at Thruxton but made a triumphant return to form after scoring two podium finishes, including his race three victory at Croft.

Having negotiated one of most the bizarre qualifying session's on record with the third fastest time, Chilton consolidated that position with a podium finish in race one before ending the second race in ninth, which crucially gave the Ford Focus RS driver pole position for race three.

Chilton led every lap of the wet-dry reverse grid encounter but was kept honest by second and third place finishers Josh Cook and Jason Plato.

"Double podium! For me, if you can get a double podium and a top-ten, that’s as good as it gets. The only way it could be better for me if I could get a double win," Chilton told Crash.net.

"I’ve leave here with what has been a perfect weekend, which is great because I left Thruxton which was almost the worst possible weekend. I was lucky I got three points last weekend!

"But this weekend was a perfect so it half makes up for Thruxton. We have got a handle with the car now. We’ve done a lot of work to it and it’s really paid off."

For the vast majority of the final race, little over a second covered the top-three order. Chilton explained he recognised Cook was applying pressure in certain corners on a drying track.

"Josh [Cook] was going into particular corners; Tower, Sunny In and the penultimate corner faster than me but, that was giving him a bad exit," Chilton continued.

"I had to make sure I didn’t brake too early for those corners. For whatever reason I didn’t have a lot of grip going in.

"I had to manage that because he was lunging every single lap, almost on purpose. Luckily for me he was going in too fast and getting a slow exit so that was helping me on the back straight.

"I think he was trying [to force me into a mistake] but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. It was a great race and it was good he was pushing me."