Ollie Taylor leads Saturday morning warm up at Brands Hatch
Pyro Motorsport’s Ollie Taylor led the first session at Brands Hatch Indi in his all-new Honda Civic Type R FK8 TCR, leading championship leader Dan Lloyd’s WestCoast Racing Volkswagen Golf GTI TCR by 0.015 seconds.
Lloyd’s time of 48.933 was for some time the best of the session, and some way faster than the chasing pack, with the Volkswagen driver almost half a second clear than the rest of the field, until Taylor went out in the last ten minutes and found more time in his new entry, jumping ahead of Lloyd by just a fraction of a second.
Derek Palmer was third fastest in the DPE Motorsport-run Alfa Romeo Giulietta, with the Scotsman benefitting from the lastest Balance of Performance measures which have kicked in since the last round, with the Alfa Romeos having lost an additional 20kg of weight.
Andreas Bäckman was fourth fastest in the #19 WestCoast Racing Volkswagen, just over half a second behind Taylor’s Honda, with Finlay Crocker fifth fastest in the Verizon Connect-backed Civic FK8.
Jessica Bäckman made a late improvement to go sixth fastest in the third of WestCoast’s Volkswagens, with Lewis Kent seventh quickest in the Essex & Kent Racing Hyundai i30 N TCR.
Stewart Lines was eighth on his TCR UK return in the Maximum Motorsport Cupra TCR, now fitted with a Sadev sequential gearbox in-place of the Direct-Shift Gearbox (DSG).
Robert Gilmour, the new signing in the DPE Alfa Romeo was ninth, with Josh Price tenth in the FK2 Honda Civic, just over a second behind.
The Wolf-Power Racing Renault Mégane TCR of Alex Morgan was 14th and last as the car focussed on set-up work, 2.3 seconds off the pace.
The next session is Free Practice at 13:25 BST.
