Tordoff hoping for 'new chapter' after Thruxton pole

AmD Tuning's Sam Tordoff is hoping pole position for the opening Thruxton British Touring Car Championship race will mark the start of an upturn in results after a trying start to 2019.

Tordoff arrives into the third weekend of the season sitting 21st in the standings having just six-points in as many races. However, the Honda Civic Type R driver has given himself the perfect opportunity to catapult back up the order after securing his first pole position in AmD colours with just seconds to spare in qualifying.

Despite breaking the qualifying lap record on his way to beating Honda's Dan Cammish with a 1 minute 15.511s lap, Tordoff, himself, was surprised in the manner in which he achieved it.

"The lap time just came," Tordoff told Crash.net. "Up until that point it had been a messy session. I didn’t do a good enough job on the first set. I got my time taken away because of track limits on the second set.

"All of a sudden, I was on my third set and I hadn’t really done a time. I had a reasonable time with a 15.7 and then the red flag happened. I was P5 and saved that and thought ‘that’s not bad’.

"We made this set of tyres out of nothing and went even quicker. It was a weird session. I need to sit down and understand what happened there because we shouldn’t have gone quicker with a set of rear tyres."

Having so far been unable to translate promising pace into results, Tordoff admits it's been a hard start to the year for his side of the garage.

"We’ve got a fast car and the team has now set its stall out to be at the front. Rory [Butcher] has been up front for the first two meetings. For whatever reason, if there’s been a 50/50 decision to be made, I’ve always chosen the wrong one," Tordoff continued.

"It’s been a bit hard on our side of the garage because we showed so much promise in pre-season and it’s all come to nothing so far. Hopefully this is the start to a new chapter.

"We need to start again here this weekend. We’ve only scored 6 points in 6 races so far this year so anything in race one tomorrow is going to be a result."