Mikey Doble took victory in the British Touring Car Championship finale at Croft, a race in which all of the overall series contenders were involved in accidents.
The Power Maxed Racing Audi A3 Saloon star-in-the-making led all the way from reversed-grid pole position while, of the championship top four, Ash Sutton, Tom Ingram and Ricky Collard were all eliminated, and Dan Cammish finished a lapped last.
Doble had PMR Audi team-mate Aiden Moffat alongside him on the front row, but Doble had soft tyres while Moffat was on the hard rubber.
That didn’t prevent the Scot drawing alongside into the first corner, but Doble clung on in front.
Behind there was chaos. Ricky Collard gave Dan Cammish a chop up to the first corner of Clervaux, but Cammish kept his Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus Titanium on the inside. Cammish, squeezed onto the kerb, got launched into Collard’s Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback as he landed.
Collard was knocked into a spin, and tagged Sutton’s Alliance Ford, which in turn speared into the CPRL Mercedes A35 Saloon of Dan Rowbottom. Further back, Aron Taylor-Smith was hit into Lewis Selby and, with Collard and Taylor-Smith stranded, the safety car emerged.
At the restart, Moffat came under attack from the Excelr8 Hyundai of Tom Chilton, and a nudge from the Surrey veteran at Sunny sent the Audi wide, allowing Chilton into second and Gordon Shedden’s Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla GR Sport into third.
From here the top three was settled, with Doble leading home Chilton and Shedden.
Ashley Sutton, NAPA Racing UK
Photo by: JEP
It was a great comeback from Doble’s qualifying race catastrophe, where electrical problems struck while he was lying fourth. A new engine was fitted to the Audi for Sunday, and PMR plotted their top driver’s course – which included getting the hard tyres out of the way in race two.
“What a recovery, eh?” said the Surrey racer. “We had the pace in the car all weekend. It was so gutting that we couldn’t get what we deserved on Saturday. So the plan today was to aim for a race three win, and it went as we imagined it all the way through.”
Behind the three-time BTCC champion Shedden, Adam Morgan gradually closed up in his CPRL Mercedes, with Josh Cook – up from the back of the grid in his Speedworks Toyota – right on his bootlid. A five-second track-limits penalty for Morgan then reversed the order of this duo, with Cook moving up to fourth.
Some way adrift, Moffat did a good job to finish as the top runner on hard tyres in sixth, just about fending off a last-lap attack from the Restart Racing Hyundai of Chris Smiley.
Smiley’s team-mate Dan Lloyd was eighth, with Dexter Patterson (PMR Audi) and Rowbottom completing the top 10.
Smiley, Lloyd, Patterson and Rowbottom were also hit with 5s penalties for track limits, but their consecutive finishing positions meant this had no impact on their results.
Ingram’s Excelr8 Hyundai was taken out when he was the victim of some furious midfield jostling at the Jim Clark Esses. With Charles Rainford (WSR BMW) moving over on him, he was sent on a high-speed bounce backwards across the grass and into eventual retirement at the pits.
BTCC Croft – Race 3 results
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– The Autosport.com Team
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