Sam Tordoff sorry for clash with team-mate Rob Collard

West Surrey Racing’s Sam Tordoff has apologised to his team-mate Rob Collard for the clash which dealt a fatal blow to the latter’s race, the second time this year Collard has retired after contact from a BMW stable-mate.

Tordoff made heavy contact with the rear of Collard as he braked for the first corner on the opening lap, leading to a puncture and rear-end damage to the BMW 125i.

The Hampshire-based driver was able to limp back to the pits and is confident his team will be able to fix the damage in time for race two, which gets underway at 2.35pm.

Both drivers gave their view on the incident to TouringCarTimes.

“I’ve got a few problems with the clutch and didn’t get off the line well, Rob made a good start as usual, came round the outside, no problems with that,” said Tordoff.

“And on the run down to turn one I was busy trying to stop Tom Ingram coming past me and I just looked in the mirror at exactly the same time that Rob’s hit the brakes, simple as that, just didn’t see him, I was looking in a completely different direction. That certainly was not the intention.

“I’ve hit him with such a huge whack that if it’d been anyone else I’d have done a really good job on them. Unfortunately I’ve done it to my own team-mate and I can only apologise.”

Collard said: “It’s just a shame it’s my team-mate, that’s the second time this season now and it’s frustrating. It wasn’t intentional, I don’t believe for one second that it was. It was just a misjudgement by Sam.

“It is just ruining the season for me. It’s the third time this season I’ve been taken out from the rear. It’s one of the problems of rear-wheel drive BMWs.

“It was all done in turn one. I got a slight bit of contact down into turn two, but I was coming into there with a puncture.”