Sutton leads Plato for Subaru 1-2 finish

Reigning British Touring Car champion Ashley Sutton has taken his first race victory of the 2018 season after leading a home a dominant Subaru one-two result ahead of Jason Plato at Croft.

Confirming Subaru's resurgence from yesterday's qualifying session, Sutton took an emphatic lights-to-flag victory from pole position, while Plato fought his way back onto the second step on the rostrum.

With Sutton controlling the race from start, BMW's Andrew Jordan managed to leap of Plato at the start-line to split the two Subarus for the opening segment of the race.

While the top-runners managed to emerge from the opening corner unscathed, an incident between Rob Austin and Stephen Jelley brought out an early safety car as the marshals recovered Austin's stricken Alfa Romeo from the gravel.

Predictably, Sutton held the lead at the restart on lap four and quickly stretched his advantage ahead of Jordan to the tune of 1.0s.

As Sutton scampered away, Jordan then began to fall further into the clutches of Plato, who appeared to have a pace advantage over the second placed BMW.

After laps of trying, Plato ultimately made the move stick in the opening complex on lap 13 as Jordan began to fall further back into the pack.

Having finally muscled his way past Jordan, Plato immediately began to hunt his race leading team mate down, and managed to slash Sutton's advantage to just 0.7s. However, the two-time champion ultimately ran out of laps as Sutton held on to take his eighth career victory. 

Off the podium, the BMW of Jordan later spun out of third position to finish down in tenth, handing the final step on the rostrum to the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Avensis of Tom Ingram.

Despite coming under race-long pressure from the two Team BMWs of Colin Turkington and Rob Collard, Sam Tordoff held fourth ahead of the aforementioned BMW duo in fifth and sixth.

Josh Cook finished in seventh for the Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall squad, while Dan Lloyd took an impressive eighth place finish on only his second weekend with the BTC Norlin Racing team.

Three-time champion Matt Neal was the highest placed factory Honda in ninth ahead of Jordan in tenth.