BTCC Brands Hatch: Turkington dominates interrupted finale

The four-time champion progressed from third on the grid to second at the start, then took one lap after an early safety car to work a way around the reversed-grid polesitting Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N of Tom Chilton.

Turkington had extended an enormous margin of 1.286 seconds within a lap of the pass, with Chilton soon conceding the runner-up spot to the second West Surrey Racing-run BMW 330e M Sport of Jake Hill.

But Hill too had nothing for Turkington, who was almost seven seconds to the good when the safety car was called for a second time.

That eradicated his lead, but Turkington made no mistakes over the five remaining laps of green-flag action and led home Hill by 1.181s at the chequered flag.

“That safety car was what wakes you up at 4am as a bad dream,” joked Turkington. “But the guys were telling me I already had fastest lap, so I was confident that with no mistakes I had the pace to win.

“It’s just reward for the pace and effort yesterday in qualifying. Getting pole position I would hope would set up the weekend, but the weather made things so tricky today.”

As Chilton freefalled down the order – he eventually pitted and then spun into the gravel at Clearways to trigger the second caution – so Bobby Thompson emerged in third place in his Team Hard Cupra Leon.

Thompson had started from the front row and had no answer to the BMWs, but was able to pull away after the final safety car from a trio of potent leading lights of the BTCC.

Tom Ingram, Bristol Street Motors with EXCELR8 TradePriceCars.com Hyundai i30N

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Championship leader Tom Ingram was at the front of these to claim fourth in his Excelr8 Hyundai, just ahead of the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla of Rory Butcher and Ash Sutton in his Motorbase Performance Ford Focus, which sustained damage from an incident with Chilton that hampered its pace.

George Gamble led this bunch in his Ciceley Motorsport BMW for a while, but dropped back to finish seventh, with Josh Cook, winner of the first two races of the day, claiming eighth in his BTC Racing Honda Civic Type R.

Rounding out the top 10 were Dan Lloyd’s Excelr8 Hyundai and the second Motorbase Ford of Dan Cammish.

The first safety car was caused by Jason Plato going straight on at Druids on the opening lap and nosing his BTC Honda into the barriers.

BTCC Brands Hatch Race 3 results

Cla	Driver	Laps	Gap
1	Colin Turkington	27
2	Jake Hill	27	1.181
3	Bobby Thompson	27	5.198
4	Tom Ingram	27	5.808
5	Rory Butcher	27	6.186
6	Ashley Sutton	27	6.488
7	George Gamble	27	7.031
8	Josh Cook	27	8.256
9	Daniel Lloyd	27	9.062
10	Dan Cammish	27	9.543
11	Gordon Shedden	27	11.783
12	Ollie Jackson	27	12.012
13	Stephen Jelley	27	12.276
14	Adam Morgan	27	12.336
15	Aiden Moffat	27	14.014
16	Aron Taylor-Smith	27	14.777
17	Jade Edwards	27	15.000
18	Sam Osborne	27	15.927
19	Jack Butel	27	16.152
20	Ricky Collard	27	17.075
21	Ash Hand	27	17.940
22	Daniel Rowbottom	27	18.645
23	Dexter Patterson	27	21.977
24	Nicolas Hamilton	27	25.229
25	Will Powell	26	1 Lap
	Tom Chilton	15	12 Laps
	Rick Parfitt Jr.	13	14 Laps
	Jason Plato	0
View full results