Andrew Jordan says he is ‘playing the long game’ in the British Touring Car Championship’s ‘diamond double’ weekend at Snetterton, with the BMW driver not changing his usual race weekend approach.
Jordan was fifth fastest in a damp and drying first practice, ending up as the leading BMW driver just over three tenths off the pace.
The BMW Pirtek Racing driver says he is not approaching the weekend any differently just yet, even though the Snetterton weekend will feature a double-points, double length race to conclude the weekend on Sunday, with a separate quick-fire qualifying session for that race also being held later on Saturday.
Although Jordan has the chance to secure big points in the final race, he brushed off suggestions that the BMWs should be strong in the longer race, even though they 125i M Sport cars have traditionally been kinder to their tyres than their front-wheel drive rivals.
“[Race three] is on the control tyre, which is the same control tyre we use all the time, so we should be strong with that,” said Jordan to TouringCars.Net. “But equally we can burn the rear tyres off our car just as easily as they burn the front ones on theirs, so we need to still be careful.
“We’re not putting emphasis on that qualifying and we’re not running without any weight in until that today, so we will play the long game for that race.
“It’s just completely normal [routine], so we’ll run with our weight with 48 kg in all the way through until qualifying two later today.
“I think we should be pretty strong and certainly over a race distance I think we should look after our tyres well.”
A shower before first practice saw Jordan get some running in the wet, which he believes will be useful for Sunday, when further rain showers are forecast.
“The car felt really good; it was certainly in the ballpark in FP1, so we’ll just try and tweak it now. It’s nice when you roll out and the car feels somewhere near [where it should be], so we’ll just try a few things in Free Practice 2.
“The rain delayed us scrubbing some tyres, but we’ve still got a run on the base setup which is good. It means we’ve got to scrub some tyres in Free Practice 2 which we don’t normally do.
“It’s all part of it and it looks like there’s going to be rain tomorrow, so at least we got one run in the wet this morning, and that should point us in the direction we need to go.”