Tom Onslow-Cole insists he is 'sticking to his guns' regarding his incident during the opening Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship race of the weekend at Knockhill – an incident that saw him excluded from the race and effectively ruined the rest of his weekend.

The Team RAC driver was producing a fine drive in the first race in Scotland having climbed from eighth on the grid to run in fourth behind title chaser Fabrizio Giovanardi in the closing laps.

With just one lap remaining, Onslow-Cole went for a move up the inside into Carlube corner, but contact between the BMW and the Vectra saw Giovanardi tipped into a sideways slide that dropped him down to seventh and allowed points leader Jason Plato to move through into a podium position.

Onslow-Cole took the flag in fourth place before being excluded from the results, although he admitted afterwards that he felt the decision had been too harsh.

"Giovanardi was brake-testing me before the chicane because that was my strongest area and I knew I could attack him under braking," he said. "On the penultimate lap, I left enough of a gap so he couldn't brake-test me but I could still catch him through the chicane. I did that and landed just behind him with a lot of extra speed, so I immediately moved to the inside of him and started making up ground to the inside of his car.

"I got up alongside him, between the front and back door, going into Carlube and hit the brakes when I needed to. He braked later and tried to come back round the outside and turned in on his normal line. Obviously he shouldn't have done that because I was already there.

"Unfortunately in the judicial room they didn't have my in-car camera footage which is a shame, because all the footage they showed wasn't actually very clear at all; they were either head-on or straight from behind where you can't see too much. Although I was penalised I'm sticking to my guns and still believe it was a genuine move."

With the exclusion also leaving Onslow-Cole to start the second race from the back of the grid, the 20-year-old faced a battle to try and come through the field in race two at the tricky circuit overlooking the Firth of Forth, but a clutch issue on his car would ensure that he was unable to climb any higher than 13th place.

Race three would see him finally break into the points with a tenth place finish to conclude a difficult race day.

"That exclusion in race one really did ruin the whole weekend," he said. "We were already coming back from a bad qualifying from which we did well to finish fourth, but then you're on the back foot starting dead last for race two. Also we developed a clutch problem, the first problem we've had this year and it really hurt us.

"We have great strength off the line but with the clutch how it was, I dropped quite a lot on everyone else. During the first few laps there was no clutch at all so the downshifts were very, very jerky, which really unsettles the car and makes it hard to build up any flow. Between races the boys at Team RAC did a great job to change it and they even had time for lunch!

"Overall it's been a day of ups and downs, sadly the ups were taken away from us and the downs were pretty steady but we've still taken eight points which is better than nothing. It's a very hard track to overtake on so that last race was particularly difficult."