Croft BTCC: Sam Tordoff pips WSR BMW team-mate Andy Priaulx to pole

The Oulton Park race winner edged his three-time world champion team-mate by just 0.070 seconds with a new qualifying lap record - 1m23.886s - in the dying embers of the session.

"I just pulled a lap out of the bag when it counted," Tordoff said.

Priaulx had looked set to bag the second pole of his BTCC comeback but could not match his young team-mate, despite setting a personal-best first sector on the last lap of the session.

Gordon Shedden's Honda will line up third for Sunday's first race, more than half a second slower than Tordoff but denying a 1-2-3 for WSR's fleet of BMW 125i M Sports.

Rob Collard jumped to third at the end of the session but lost his time for a track limits infringement, so Shedden reclaimed the spot.

Colin Turkington was defeated in a Croft qualifying session for the first time since 2007, but wound up the lead Team BMR Volkswagen CC in fifth.

The 2014 champion bagged pole at Croft in 2008, '09, '13 and last year - having missed three years in between - but the fleet of CCs did not have the pace of the all-conquering rear-wheel drive BMWs.

Turkington fared much better than team-mate Jason Plato, who follows up a dominant Oulton Park meeting with 12th in qualifying here and 75kgs of ballast for the first race.

Matt Neal will start that alongside Turkington on row three in his Honda Civic Type-R, after just edging out Rob Austin - who claimed his best qualifying result of the season so far in seventh.

The two MGs of Jack Goff and Andrew Jordan bagged eighth and 10th respectively, with Adam Morgan's Ciceley Racing Mercedes A-Class in between the two Triple Eight-run MG6 GTs.

Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton's younger brother Nicolas will start his first BTCC race 29th, having ended qualifying 4.1s off the pace in his AmD Tuning Audi S3.

He ended up one place behind fellow BTCC debutant Max Coates.

QUALIFYING TIMES: