Sam Tordoff heads to Brands Hatch in the lead of the championship after two wins and five second place finishes. The West Surrey Racing driver has been running strong all season, finishing inside the top ten in almost every race, but a couple of pointless finish and a “Did Not Start” at Snetterton means his advantage isn’t as big as it could be at this point.
Sam Tordoff’s championship points
Qualifying at Brands Hatch led to a promising start to the season, Tordoff taking a fourth place start for the first race of 2016. The hope was wiped out early on though, when a spin dropped the WSR driver to the back of the field. Tordoff set about recovering, managing to climb his way back up to sixteenth before the end of the race, just outside the points.
Soft tyres for race two made slicing his way through the top fifteen all the way up to ninth in the second race, allowing Tordoff to put points on his score sheet and awarding him the reverse grid pole for the final race of the weekend. On the opening lap of the race, Tordoff dropped back behind the faster starting Adam Morgan and, though he was on the WIX Racing driver’s tail for the majority of the race, he couldn’t find a way back into the lead. Still, second was much better than the WSR driver could have hoped for when he span to the back of the field in race one.
A red flag in qualifying meant Tordoff would be starting the first race at Donington Park from twenty first on the grid. It was going to be an uphill battle, but one the WSR driver was definitely up for, shooting off of the line to move up to seventeenth on the opening lap. A trouble free lap meant he was able to make it up to the top ten over the course of the race, eventually finishing ninth.
Race two was less than trouble free, dropping back down the pack midway through the race, but the Leeds based driver was able to recover to cross the line in eighth, putting him on pole for the reverse grid once again. With the soft tyres on his car though, keeping that lead wasn’t going to be easy. Tordoff stayed ahead of Neal for the majority of the race but, with only three laps to go, he fell behind both Hondas. Still Tordoff clung to the podium, a third place making his second podium finish of the season.
Thruxton was a relatively quiet race for Tordoff. A seventh and sixth in the first two races lead to a good points haul, but there was no sign of a third podium. It looked like he might take that podium in the final race of the weekend when the WSR driver was challenging for second, but a spin dropped him back through the field. He eventually finished seventeenth, his second finish outside the points.
With Neal and Collard now over a hundred points, it looked like Tordoff was falling out of the championship battle. There as work to be done if he was going to turn his championship around at this early stage. Oulton Park was just the place to do that.
Tordoff would start the first race at Oulton Park from the second row of the grid, behind Daniel Lloyd and Colin Turkington. It didn’t take the Leeds driver to get past Lloyd and, by the end of lap one, Tordoff was less than a second behind Turkington. He tried to keep pressure on the race leader, but Turkington eventually built up a small gap, leaving Tordoff in second.
Starting from second, Tordoff managed to go one better in race two. The WSR driver overtook Turkington on the opening lap, and there was no looking back from there. Tordoff was unchallenged by the two Subaru drivers behind him, and he took his first win of the championship. His return to the championship fight was consolidated in race three with a second place, despite the reverse grid putting him on the back foot, and Tordoff left the race at the top of the table.
From that point, the only time Tordoff lost control of the championship was when he was unable to start the final race at Snetterton, his team mate taking that lead for a single race.
A break down of Tordoff’s finishes this season
After Oulton, Tordoff took three more second place finishes, and another win. That said, the rest of his finishes haven’t been very spectacular. The collection of finishes at the bottom end of the top ten and a couple of eleven places mean he doesn’t have the advantage he would have liked. He may have been taking points in almost every race, but top finishes from the rest of those in the championship fight meant his championship lead was always under threat.
Still, Tordoff does have an eleven point advantage over his closest rival. The number of drivers still in with a shot means keeping that lead might not be easy though. Keeping track of one championship rival would be hard enough, but the seven he has means another weekend like Oulton Park would be ideal. But the championship is still Tordoff’s to lose.
Photo Credit: Caroline Rhea
