Turkington takes sensational pole on maximum ballast

Defending British Touring Car champion Colin Turkington defied running maximum success ballast by securing his second pole position of the year during qualifying at Oulton Park.

By virtue of being the current championship leader, Turkington arrived into the 30-minute qualifying shootout carrying the maximum 52 kilos of success ballast.

However, despite never featuring towards the top of the timesheets throughout any of the practice running the Team BMW driver produced a sublime qualifying effort to take pole position by just 0.027s ahead of AmD's Sam Tordoff in second.

Turkington set what proved to be an unbeatable 1'25.825s lap during the first sequence of runs, with Tordoff coming the closest to knocking the leading BMW 330i M Sport off the top of the timesheets after the Honda Civic Type R driver set his best lap with 10 minutes to go.

In what proved to be a straight fight between BMW and Honda machinery for pole position, both the German and Japanese manufacturer's locked out the front seven positions, with Jason Plato ending the session 'best of the rest' in eighth for Vauxhall.

Having set the fastest time in FP2 prior to qualifying, Dan Cammish settled for a position on the second row with the third quickest time, alongside the recovering BMW of Andrew Jordan in fourth.

Jordan missed the vast majority of FP2 after picking up damage early in the 40-minute but recovered to keep his West Surrey Racing BMW in contention for tomorrow's opening race.

Looking to make amends for what proved to be a dismal weekend last time out at Croft, AmD Tuning's Rory Butcher qualified his Honda Civic Type R in fifth position ahead of Matt Neal and Tom Oliphant in sixth and seventh.

Power Maxed Racing's Plato followed marginally behind in eighth, while Tom Ingram and Jake Hill completed the remainder of the top-ten grid order in ninth and tenth.