Andrew Jordan: “I proved a point with my best BTCC weekend of the year”

As a team, we just haven’t had the luck to match the pace we’ve shown. I wasn’t worried about it; I just wanted to run up at the front where we belong. Free practice was a tyre-scrubbing exercise – I was slowest on the timesheets! – while we got down to some sensible set-up work in FP2.

My Motorbase engineer Andy Brown – with whom I’ve really gelled now having been with him since 2014 – and I made some changes and the car was better. There was still a bit too much understeer but I was pretty happy with the ballpark feeling.

And that translated into P4 in qualifying. We were 0.1s off pole with a bit of weight in the car so that was really encouraging. I managed to get a great tow from the Dynamics Honda boys too so it all worked out well.

I went into Sunday’s first race aiming to win it. The understeer was still a bit of a problem and fourth on the road was the best I could manage. That became second when the two MGs were disqualified for rear-wing irregularities. The extra points were very useful! As was the front-row starting spot for race two!

I’d opted to start race two on the soft tyre and knew that with 48kg (my race-one fourth-place ballast) on board I’d have to be careful with the tyres. We’d seen on other cars in race one that they’d started well but faded later on.

I followed Tom Ingram’s Toyota for about seven laps and was trying to loosen him up – without bashing him, of course, because I don’t play dirty. In the end I nailed him up the inside into the Becketts hairpin. He complimented me on the move afterwards, which was cool. All the while I’d managed to look after the tyres. I was careful at Brooklands, where there’d been some punctures during the day.

I soon had Adam Morgan hunting me down and when the safety car emerged and bunched us all up I had to really focus on making good my escape when it went back in. There was also the issue of the soft tyres cooling down and not getting back up into the window. I scampered off at the restart and got my head down, setting my best laps with two or three laps to go. And the tyres were OK.

It was a great feeling to win again – for the first time since Thruxton in May! I felt that I’d proved that point I mentioned earlier, too. It was good to win on a tyre that people didn’t think was up to the job. It was a solid couple of races for us and Andy had hooked me up a good car for both.

Race three was damage limitation, really. From eighth on the grid, with 75kg of ballast, I managed to eventually end up in the same position, which was OK. The weight makes the car lethargic under acceleration and adds to tyre wear so I was happy with where we were.

This amazing championship yet again comes down to the finale on the magnificent Brands Hatch Grand Prix circuit. I love the place – it’s a proper, old-school, unspoilt track with ups and downs between the trees and a BTCC car feels edgy round the back there. I can’t wait!

I need a bit of a miracle to win the title from sixth place and 31 points behind, but I scored 46 points at Silverstone so you never know. I’ve got nothing to lose and am going to roll my sleeves up, get stuck in and see what happens. See you there!

Photography courtesy of btcc.net.