Sam Tordoff believes Motorbase Performance had the pace to win the opening British Touring Car Championship race, if not for a mechanical fault, believed to be either the gearbox or electronics.
The Ford Focus RS made a decent getaway, but was forced to relinquish third to the Honda Civic Type R FK8 of Dan Cammish on the outside of Redgate.
Tordoff felt the problem on the second tour of the circuit, and from there was compromised as he drove around the problem whilst defending third from the Mercedes A-Class of Aiden Moffat, a position won back from the waning Chris Smiley.
“We don’t know what the problem is yet, it broke on lap two so I had to drive the rest of that race without the use of my gearbox,” explained Tordoff to TouringCars.net.
“The fact that we could keep up despite that is ridiculous, we’ve got so much pace, but then the problem finally seized coming out of the Old Hairpin.”
The GardX-backed racer believes, if not for the issue, a first race victory since rejoining the championship was likely.
“Given the problem, third was the best we could achieve. I started pulling away from Aiden once I’d figured out how to drive the car. I was doing road-style gear changes.
“We should have won that race, easily. We had so much pace in the bag. I drove it like a road car and was still running third.”
The Yorkshire-based driver believes a strong result is still on the cards in the remaining two races this afternoon.
“Absolutely, we’re hugely fast and the championship is still there for the taking. We just need to get this run of bad luck out of the way and start scoring some points.”