Tordoff 'surprised' to qualify on the front-row

Motorbase Performance's Sam Tordoff has admitted his surprise in qualifying second for tomorrow's opening British Touring Car Championship race after 'a difficult' Saturday at Oulton Park.

The Ford Focus RS driver secured his second front-row qualifying result of the season so far after ending the 30-minute as runaway pole man Matt Simpson's closest challenger in second position.

However, despite his scintillating pace, Tordoff said extracting the lap time out of his Ford was made difficult due to the car 'feeling a bit on the edge'.

Nevertheless, Motorbase Performance enjoyed a magnificent afternoon with Tordoff, Tom Chilton and James Cole all qualifying within the top-eight order.

"I’m very happy with that," Tordoff told Crash.net. "We’ve had a difficult day to be honest. I didn’t think we’d quite have the pace so that lap time is a bit surprising and where we’re at is a bit surprising.

"Obviously I’ll take it but it’s been a bit hard work today. The car has been a bit on the edge. I’ve had a few offs. I wouldn’t normally make quite as many mistakes I have in practice. It’s just been hard to produce a time.

"But we got there in qualifying. We can’t argue with P2.

"The car is clearly quick because we’ve just qualified in P2, it’s just hard to get everything out of it. Fair play to Matt Simpson, he was in a different race today. Being 0.2s up the road is quite impressive."

Looking ahead to tomorrow's three races, Tordoff is in confident mood as the 2016-runner up looks to follow up on a successful Thruxton round in similar fashion to make major inroads in the BTCC title race.

"I’ve got no worries about tomorrow at all. I think we’ve just got to get a good start and get our head down. We’ve got one BMW around us with Jordan in P4 so he might get in the mix," Tordoff continued.

"The important thing is we’ve got no weight and we’re at the front. It’s perfect.

"I think that’s best qualifying Motorbase Performance has ever had, which is cool. Clearly the car is quick and we don’t have any weight at the moment, which is helping.

"We should have some weight because I should be a lot further up in the championship, but we’re not at the moment so I need another weekend like I had at Thruxton.

"That should catapult me back towards the top-five. If we can get three fourth places tomorrow, I’ll take 39 points all day long."