AmD Tuning’s Sam Tordoff is keen to turnaround what he describes as a “shocking” first half to his 2019 British Touring Car Championship season in tomorrow’s trio of races at Oulton Park.
The 2016 runner-up topped the opening practice session at the Cheshire circuit before placing sixth in second practice.
Come qualifying, Tordoff was just 0.027s adrift of polesitter Colin Turkington after a great effort on his middle run to finish best of the Hondas.
Tordoff told TouringCars.Net he “had to be happy” with the effort as the fastest time he’s clocked at Oulton Park, but felt he could have gone quicker due to the circumstances of the circuit being fastest when drops of rain fell and it clouded over at the start of the half-hour session.
“Well that’s the fastest I’ve ever gone around here for a start so I can’t be disappointed with P2,” said Tordoff. “I think I probably did the lap at the wrong time, the track was fastest right at the beginning when there was a momentary bit of rain and it clouded over.
“I think that’s when you needed to do the time and I didn’t do it. I had a bit of traffic on my first set of tyres, but in the middle run it was better.
“If I’m finding excuses as to where those two hundredths of a second were I think it was just circumstance and track conditions at the time.
“But I’ve got to be happy with that.”
As Oulton Park is traditionally a difficult circuit to make overtakes at, Tordoff is eager to turnaround his dreadful 2019 campaign with strong results in tomorrow’s trio of races.
To do so, he believes he needs to try to keep Andrew Jordan’s BMW behind at the start, and “run his own race” to secure strong points.
“It’s clearly been shocking, for a myriad of reasons,” explained Tordoff.
“But we just need to keep chipping away. If we can have a good end to the first half of the season, then we can go into the break on a high, then it’ll certainly ease the pain over the next four weeks of rest.
“I’m just going to try to get across and tuck in. The rear-wheel drive cars are going to be fast and are fast here generally.
“They’ve got weight but it doesn’t seem to affect them so I’m not looking to that for any kind of assistance so I’ve just got to drive my own race and we’ll end up where we end up.”
The opening British Touring Car Championship race of the weekend at Oulton Park is scheduled to get underway at 12:20 BST.