Jordan plans to 'box smart' from fourth

BMW Pitrek Racing's Andrew Jordan says he intends to 'box smart' from fourth position on the grid as he seeks to maintain the heat in this season's British Touring Car Championship battle at Oulton Park.

Jordan set the fourth fastest time during yesterday's 30-minute qualifying but only after recovering from an earlier FP2 mishap, which threatened to derail the remainder of his weekend.

The 2013 BTCC champion spun on the exit of turn one at the beginning of second practice and ended up collecting the unfortunate Matt Simpson, who was at the wrong place and wrong time while exiting the pit-lane at the time.

Jordan ultimately missed the remainder of FP2, while the incident also meant Simpson was unable to take part in qualifying due to the accident damage.

The WSR driver held his hands up for the error and apologised to Simpson.

"I obviously had no running through a mistake of mine. I wasn’t happy with that. More so because it’s pretty much ruined Simpson’s weekend. Apologies for that, but it is what it is," Jordan told Crash.net.

"I dropped a wheel on the grass out of turn one and I was spinning across the track when he was coming out of the pit-lane.

"It was just real bad luck for him in terms of where his car was at the time I was spinning. Obviously that took out all of our qualifying set up work time in FP2.

"We went into qualifying a bit blind. We made changes for FP2 which we didn’t get to evaluate.

"The first time I got to feel what those changes had done was in qualifying. So I was a little bit cautious on the first run just to make sure I got a banker lap in.

"I’m happy with it. Colin did a really, really good lap. But I’m happy that puts me in a position to score good points."

Although Jordan arrives into today's three races with the opportunity of scoring an unprecedented third double success in a row, the BMW 330i M Sport says the emphasis will be on scoring strong points, rather than trying to force race wins.

Jordan goes into the first race 28-points behind pole-sitter and championship leader Colin Turkington, with the Hondas of Sam Tordoff and Dan Cammish separating the duo BMW.

"We really need to put the emphasis on the points and not the wins. So if I’ve there’s a sniff a win then of course I’ll go for it but we need to just box smart," Jordan continued.

"Colin is in a good position to score good points but I can’t control what he does. I can only control what we do. We’re in a good place so I think we’ll be strong over the race.

"It would be nice to try and do them [Tordoff and Cammish] both off the start and then if Colin and I could get gone together, that would be great. That’ll be the plan but it’s quite a short run to turn one so it’ll just depend what sort of launch I’ll get.

"That’s in my head. If I can try and get a good start and get into second by turn one, hopefully we can both pull away."