Rainford gets the verdict in free practice

British Touring Car Championship rookie Charles Rainford drew first blood at Knockhill by emerging fastest from free practice.

While much of the attention was on the return of reigning champion Jake Hill, who had to skip the competitive element of the weekend last time out at Croft due to suffering labyrinthitis, it was the sister West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport of Rainford that grabbed the limelight.

The effervescent Rainford moved to the top of the times shortly after the second of two red-flag periods in FP2 for the realignment of Recticel blocks at the chicane, then chipped another tenth off his time the following time around.

With three minutes remaining, Aron Taylor-Smith whisked his Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Corolla GR Sport around just 0.020 seconds slower than Rainford to end the session in second place.

That run by the Dubliner demoted Dan Lloyd, who bounced back after being forced to miss the final race at Croft with an engine problem to go third fastest in his Restart Racing Hyundai i30 N Fastback.

Lloyd was at the head of a Hyundai 3-4-5-6, with Excelr8 Motorsport duo Tom Ingram and Senna Proctor, plus Restart team-mate Chris Smiley, finishing in that order.

Championship leader Ingram was quickest in the early-morning FP1 session, a comfortable 0.222s clear of Dan Rowbottom, but the times from this period were comfortably eclipsed later on.

Reports were that the track surface was dirty in FP1, and it did not help that the recovery of Nic Hamilton’s Un-Limited Motorsport Cupra from the gravel trap at the hairpin ate into the 35 minutes of running time by over a third of the session.

Daryl DeLeon followed up his Croft podium with seventh in his WSR BMW, with Rowbottom eighth in the fastest of the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus STs.

Rowbottom was the quickest of those on medium tyres in FP1, and only went a couple of tenths quicker on the soft rubber on which everyone will qualify.

Rounding out the top 10 were Dan Cammish (Alliance Ford) and Aiden Moffat (WSR BMW), who set identical times.

Hill ended up 14th, while points runner-up Ash Sutton went 19th quickest – slower than he ran in FP1.

With the qualifying groups formed by alternate positions in FP2, that means Sutton will run in the first group and Ingram in the second.

After its devasting fire, Power Maxed Racing emerged with its two borrowed Cupra Leons, with Mikey Doble the fastest in 16th.

The altruism of the family of Dexter Patterson, which came to the rescue of PMR with its ‘spare’ Cupra, went unrewarded when the Scot was the first of three drivers to be black-flagged in FP2 for track-limits offences, with Adam Morgan and Cammish following him into the sin bin.

Local hero and Knockhill commercial director Gordon Shedden had no chance to incur any track-limits offences – a broken exhaust clamp meant his Speedworks Toyota did not complete a hot lap in FP2, although he was sixth in the earlier session.