Onslow-Cole: Fords will get faster

Onslow-Cole's first pole since his days as a Vauxhall driver in 2008 was achieved by a margin of 0.020 seconds from Honda's Gordon Shedden, and the polesitter thinks that a few set-up adjustments will make the LPG-powered machine quicker still.

"The car is good and I've finally had enough laps in it that I think I can extract a lot of speed," Onslow-Cole said. "Although I think the lap itself was a bit scrappy.

"And there's more to come too. I'd not driven the car with that particular set-up before qualifying, so I wasn't really at ease with it. We can definitely refine things for the race."

Onslow-Cole said that the Chevrolet pairing of Jason Plato and Alex MacDowall, who will start the opening race third and fourth, are the drivers to watch out for.

"You can see that in the sector analysis, it was MacDowall who set the best times in all three of them, but he did them all on different laps," he said.

"Plato is the one that looks really strong because he's done a lap within a tenth of me and he's got 36kg of ballast."

Both Onslow-Cole and his team-mate Tom Chilton, who qualified fifth, are running with a mandatory 37mm air restrictor imposed by series organiser TOCA in order to slow the cars' straightline speeds.