Sam Tordoff was left pleased with the performance of his JCT600 with GardX BMW after it carried him to the fastest time of 48.132 seconds during the second free practice session ahead of this weekends opening round of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship.
Tordoff, twice a race-winner last year, topped the timesheets ahead of the surprise duo of Aron Smith and Tom Ingram, with reigning champion Gordon Shedden fourth ahead of Adam Morgan’s Mercedes A-Class.
Tordoff, speaking to TouringCars.net at Brands Hatch, believes the lap time is reasonably representative of where the car is performing today and cited the sunny conditions at the Kent venue as a contributing factor to the pace.
“I think that’s a good gauge of where we’re at.” summarised Tordoff.
“The lap time is quick, I think it was three tenths quicker than pole last year. The track is quick today, it’s a lot warmer which is quite strange for this time of year. But, generally speaking, the car feels very good.”
Tordoff indicated as early into pre-season as Thruxton testing that the BMW was due to recieve some upgrades from Neil Brown Engineering after struggling with engine performance in 2015. He still feels there is a development curve to pursue in this area, which only adds to the sweet feeling of being fastest.
“We’ve addressed over the winter some of the weaknesses we had, notably the engine and we’ve still got a lot more to come in that area so if we can keep progressing in this vein it looks like a job well done.” commented Tordoff.
The session passed without significant trouble for Tordoff, unlike his team-mate Rob Collard, who developed a misfire and was consigned to his garage with only seven laps running completed. By comparison, Tordoff completed a total of 25 laps across the forty minute session. However, he revealed it wasn’t quite as straightforward as it may have seemed.
“We ran through a couple of things we wanted to try, some worked, some didn’t.” he explained.
“And then we sort of put it all together at the end and bolted new tyres on. Traffic is a little bit of an issue, as it always is around here, so we’ll just have to be very patient in qualifying and wait for the gap.”
Heading into qualifying, live text commentary of which is available on TouringCars.net at 15:30 ahead of a 15:40 start, Tordoff feels that small tweaks are now needed before he heads out for the first qualifying session of the season.
“[It’s] small changes now. I’ve not got a perfect balance, clearly it’s quite quick. Sometimes not a perfect balance is the quickest way. When everything feels great, often you’re a lot slower.”