After a storming drive in Sunday’s opening Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship race at Rockingham, championship leader Sam Tordoff said 10th place gives him the best chance to salvage a strong points haul.
The West Surrey Racing driver started the day nine points clear of Matt Neal in the championship, but suffered a Saturday to forget after qualifying 27th on the grid for the opening race at the Corby circuit.
Tordoff charged through to 10th place despite carrying 75kg success ballast in the first 18-lapper of the day, ending just two places adrift of Neal in a race won by the second Halfords Yuasa Racing Honda Civic Type-R of Gordon Shedden.
Still leading the points by seven, Tordoff told The Checkered Flag that it could be a crucial 10th place finish, saying: “Absolutely. For Matt [Neal] to be only two places further up the road is a pretty good result.
“I was hoping that we’d maybe just scrape a top-10 result. Now we can take all the weight out of it and be on the medium tyre again in race two. We struggled yesterday for all the world to see. We left ourselves a lot of work to do this morning; it’s still not perfect, we need to make it better still.
“Taking all the weight out of it will help and we’ll see how we go in race two, but the good thing is that now we’ve scored some good points, we’re back in the race and we can have a good race two and three.”
WSR team-mate Rob Collard was one of those Tordoff overtook on his charge, the latter finishing 14th while running the harder Dunlop tyre compound.
“Rob was on the harder tyre”, Tordoff added on WSR’s teamwork. “He was doing a different race to us, so he made it easy when I caught him up. I’ll do the same in race three in reply.”
Asked on whether the lack of success ballast will make WSR a potent force in race two, Tordoff said: “I hope so. We’ll have more pace, but let’s not get too carried away just yet.
“It’s looking good. Hopefully it will be dry and we can keep picking up more places.”
