British Touring Car Championship title contender Tom Ingram has inherited pole position for the Silverstone round after qualifying topper Aron Taylor-Smith was excluded.
Taylor-Smith, his third-fastest team-mate Mikey Doble plus sixth-placed Dan Zelos all fell foul of the ride-height test, and will start race one from the back of the grid.
Aron Taylor-Smith appeared to have given BTCC minnow Power Maxed Racing its second successive Silverstone pole position.
The Midlands squad’s Vauxhall Astra topped qualifying in 2023 in the hands of rookie Mikey Doble – the only driver to break the Alliance Racing Ford monopoly of pole positions.
This time around Taylor-Smith mastered wet conditions, after rain fell before the second segment of qualifying, and it would have been the cheerful Dubliner’s first BTCC pole since Thruxton in 2015.
Taylor-Smith had set a good enough time in the dry Q1 to scrape through, despite ending the session in the pits because the gear lever had broken off in his hand.
The PMR crew worked hard to get it fixed, and Taylor-Smith’s first flying lap of Q2 was enough to put him in the Quick Six shootout.
He then topped the final segment by 0.092 seconds from Ingram.
Ingram’s Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N was allowed just three seconds per lap of turbo and hybrid power boost due to his position in second place in the points. He made it through in sixth place in his group in Q1, and then the rain enabled him to progress to an unexpected position on the front row by mitigating the handicap of his boost restriction.
Ingram had been “confident enough of top eight realistically” had it stayed dry.
Doble, who topped his Q1 group, was a force all day at the start of a weekend where he could clinch the Jack Sears Trophy title for drivers who have never taken an overall podium before the start of the season.
Colin Turkington was fastest in Q2, but the Northern Irish four-time champion could only make an incremental improvement in the Quick Six and ended up fourth in his West Surrey Racing BMW 330e M Sport, on seven seconds per lap of hybrid. But the exclusions have now moved him onto the front row.
Josh Cook was quickest in his Q1 group, and he ended up third at the wheel of his Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla, while Zelos did an excellent job on his second BTCC outing to get into the final shootout in his Excelr8 Hyundai.
Dan Cammish was fastest of those in Q2 not to make it into the Quick Six. His Alliance Racing-run Ford Focus ST, running a one-off Valvoline livery this weekend as well as team-mate Sam Osborne, will start fourth.
Andrew Watson should be next in his Speedworks Toyota, but a three-place grid penalty from the last round at Donington Park means he will line up eighth alongside Dan Rowbottom’s Alliance Ford.
Championship leader Jake Hill, with just one second of hybrid, was an excellent second in his Q1 group in his WSR BMW, but found his rear tyres too highly pressured in the wet and slipped to ninth – bumped up to fifth by the exclusions and Watson’s penalty – with team-mate Adam Morgan next.
The biggest scalp from Q1 was Ash Sutton, his Ford in conventional NAPA livery. On 5s per lap of hybrid, he could set a lap good only for 14th on the grid despite clearly ragging the Focus.
Also out in Q1 was free practice pacesetter Tom Chilton, whose confidence in running medium tyres on his Excelr8 Hyundai in Q1 proved misplaced.
