Smith: It feels a little bit surreal!

WIX Racing's Brett Smith has described his maiden British Touring Car Championship pole position as 'surreal' after claiming the honours duirng the final qualifying session of the year at Brands Hatch.

The Eurotech driver led an all conquering Honda top-five lock-out after narrowly beating the Team Dynamics Honda Civic Type-R of Dan Cammish by just 0.043s during today's 30-minute shootout.

Smith's previous best qualifying effort came at Thruxton earlier in the season when the 26-year old qualified his Type-R into third.

The Honda driver admitted he was surprised to hear he was on pole position when receiving the call during his in-lap.

"I didn’t know I got pole until I started backing off on the second run," Smith told Crash.net. "My delta said I was about 0.030s slower. Through sector 1 I lost a little on that second run and gained back through sectors two, three and four and went banzai into the last corner.

"I still thought there was a little bit left! My dad [Jeff Smith] told me over the radio when I was picking up rubber!

"It feels a little bit surreal! I feel like someone is going to come along and tell me you didn’t get pole! It’s just surreal. I’ve got to pinch myself.

"Qualifying has been really strong for me this year. If you take Croft out, I think my average has been about P7. It’s just that Sundays have been lacking that little bit. I think that comes with experience."

Having put himself in a perfect position to claim his first victory in the series, Smith is confident a small amount of fettling to his Civic Type-R will allow him to deliver an appropriate result tomorrow.

"This is massive chassis circuit. The car was quite ‘lairy’ then. You need the car to be quite ‘oversteery’ so it doesn’t overwork the fronts. It was like that then. We just need to calm it down a touch. It’s a fine margin," Smith continued.

"There’s no reason why not. In FP1 we did an 8-lap semi race run and drop off was about 0.150s a lap. So when we’re talking normally a second off the pace in race trim, basically I just need to try my best to get out front and pull a gap, and modulate that gap.

"I have got the soft tyre, which can work and can’t work around here. It’s a bit of a lottery. You want to use the extra grip because it’s there. You just have to remind yourself it’s only there for a short period of time."