Sam Tordoff: Donington Park first real test for engine developments

Sam Tordoff was pleased with the way the West Surrey Racing team have been working throughout the morning, but played down his chances in qualifying based on past results around Donington Park.

The 28 year old set the second fastest time in FP2, behind the session-topping Josh Cook, but was quick to stress the difficulty of the circuit conditions around the Leicestershire

“It was OK, we just ran through our programme, did our thing and put some [new] tyres on at the end,” Tordoff told TouringCarTimes. “To be honest it’s been a difficult day because it’s been very greasy, the track’s had very low grip. We struggled to get any heat in the tyres, and you can see that in the times, we’re about a second off of where we were last year.

“I think from the amount of people that’ve been going off and through the grass you can see it’s been difficult out there. The weather has been better, it was certainly getting a bit better and warmer in that session, I think it’ll come to us in qualifying. How quick it’ll be is anyone’s guess.”

Donington Park has historically not been friendly to the BMWs and after a winter of development, Tordoff said this was the first time the team will get to see how much their work has paid off.

“We’ve struggled a little bit round here in the past, the engine’s always been a problem for us here and with the developments over the winter, this’ll be the first real gauge of where we’re at in terms of engine improvement, with Brands Hatch being the nature of the circuit it is it’s not really an engine circuit, we don’t really know the gains we made. After qualifying we’ll know where we’re at and how much we’ve improved our engine.”