ke Jordan suffered a frustrating time at Snetterton in the latest three rounds of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship over the weekend (28/29 July). After a strong eighth place in the opening race, Jordan's John Guest Speedfit-backed Honda was forced out of the second and third races by a major component failure. Despite the disappointment, Mike continues to lead the BTCC Independents' Trophy with nine races still to run."We've had great reliability this year and I'm very disappointed that a component failure has put us out of two races this weekend," said Mike. "Our reliability has been excellent this year and this is just one of those things. But we'll come back stronger than ever at Brands for the next rounds."In qualifying, Mike found the car very nervous in the fast corners, but still managed to post a top 10 time, having lapped within seven-tenths of a second of the pole time. "After qualifying we found one of the diff plates was broken and that explained the problems we'd had. But that put us on the back foot a bit and for the first race we hadn’t been able to do any fine tuning."Nevertheless, he was soon fighting up the order and battled mightily with the works SEAT of Darren Turner for sixth place. Eventually, Turner edged ahead as Turner's team mate Jason Plato came back into contention. "Darren was just slowing it down a bit to try and let Jason catch us," admitted Mike, who was able to hold seventh with Plato right on his tail at the flag. "We didn't quite have the pace to go with the front guys and we had a little bit of understeer. But I was quite happy with the result."For the second race, Mike was confident of improving his pace still further. "We made some changes for the second race and even on the out lap the car felt really good." However, as the cars lined up on the grid, there was a clonk from the transmission and Mike thought he would be stranded on the grid. "I thought it wasn't going to restart. I finally got going and the car had a little vibration."Then came an early safety car period and another major bang and serious vibration sent Mike into the pits. "All the flywheel bolts have sheared and we think it might have broken the crank." The problem also cost him a start in the third race despite a major effort from the Eurotech crew. "The guys made a monster effort to change the engine and we were probably three minutes short of making it out for the third race. It had also broken the input shaft on the gearbox and we had a big repair to do on that as well."The BTCC action now heads to Brands Hatch in Kent over the weekend of 18/19 August and Mike fully expects to back in the battle for race wins and podium finishes.