Morgan: Maiden pole 'feels like a win'

Mac Tools Racing's Adam Morgan says clinching his first ever British Touring Car Championship pole position at Rockingham 'feels like a race win'. 

The Mercedes A-Class driver narrowly came out on top of a close battle with Motorbase Performance's Sam Tordoff by 0.1s to secure his own and Ciceley Motorsport's first pole position in the BTCC.

Morgan set a 1 minute 22.835s lap during his final sequence of runs to snatch the position away from the Ford Focus RS of Tordoff, who had led most of the 30-minute shootout up until that point.

"I’m absolutely over the moon. It genuinely feels like a race win to get pole position," Morgan told Crash.net.

"Croft was a bit of a nightmare and Snetterton was a disaster, even though we had strong pace. We came away with hardly any points.

"I said after Snetterton I was going to go 120% and we’ve come away with our first pole position."

Having featured well inside the top-ten in both practice sessions, Morgan had initially arrived into qualifying with the aim of making into the top-five, but immediately surpassed that expectation after jumping straight towards top-three during his first run.

"We went into qualifying with P5 in mind. I ended up P3 from the first run and I was told I needed to find another 0.1s to be safe," Morgan continued.

"I found a bit more time. I kept asking my dad ‘where am I?’ but it wasn’t until the chequered flag dropped when he told me that’s my first ever pole! I’m chuffed to bits.

"I looked at my delta following the first sequence of corners and it said I was 0.3s up so I like ‘bloody hell, here we go!’. I set a good last sector and that was enough to put me 0.2s in the lead."

With his first pole in the BTCC coming during his seventh year in the series, Morgan admitted extracting one-lap pace during a qualifying session, in comparison to his race pace, has not been a particular strong point of his.

"It’s never been my favourite part of racing. I’m much of a racer than a qualifier. Our race pace has always been our strong point. We’ve had a lot of fastest laps in races. We’ve just never really found that pace in qualifying," said Morgan.

"Whether it’s for me or the car, I’m not too sure. It feels great. We are a small team and we’re taking it to the big boys."