Andrew Jordan heaped praise on the Pirtek Racing team as he had his strongest weekend since Croft as he secured a trio of top six finishes and a podium finish in the 3rd race of the weekend.
Having qualified fifth fastest, the 2013 Champion went on to secure a hard fought sixth, fourth and third place results to ensure he held onto fourth overall in the drivers’ Championship heading to Silverstone, with his hopes of becoming back to back Champion hanging by a thread as he sits 111 points behind Championship leader Colin Turkington with 134 left in the season.
The opening race saw Jordan net sixth place but he felt that there was more to come from the car: “We didn’t quite have the car how we needed it to be,” he said. “We did a race run in the second free practice session and the car felt good. Maybe we should have changed it a little as the ambient temperature came up.”
Race two of the weekend saw Jordan run a different tyre strategy compared to most of the others as he ran the soft Dunlop tyre and the move brought him a fourth place finish and a second row start for the reverse grid finale.
“I think we should have finished second but we got hit on the first lap and dropped four places to tenth,” explained Jordan.
“With the soft tyres, I wanted to go quite easy on them in the early laps to make sure I had something left at the end. But because of the incident I had to go for it from the start and got through to fourth. Then I just didn’t have enough front right tyre left to get to Tordoff. It was frustrating because if we’d finished the first lap in fifth or sixth, we’d have got second.”
Having used the soft Dunlop tyre in race two, Jordan was back on the medium tyre for the third race of the weekend and he knew he was in for a long race. He defended his position from the first corner until the end of the 16 lap encounter to secure his first podium finish since his race 3 win at Croft, his seventh podium finish of the season.
“I started third and just about everyone else was on the soft tyres. I thought we’d do well to finish in the top six. I thought it would be hard work, and it was,” he said later.
“It was probably one of my better drives: it was such a defensive drive. When you see Colin Turkington behind you on lap one and he’s on the soft tyres, you know it is going to be tough. I made the decision to go defensive from lap one.
“I thought I was just putting off the inevitable and it felt like a very long race. It was good to be back on the podium and everyone in the team did a really good job,” Jordan concluded.