A difficult couple of days testing lead into qualifying with pace in the dry still being an unknown. Threatening weather had hopes up for a wet day but in the end a dry qualifying saw Dan qualify in 10th, 10th and 11th. His best time was 0.8s faster than his best in practice but still not enough to push him up the grid.
Rain over lunch meant that the right hand side of the grid was still damp at the start and this severely hampered the getaway of all on this side, Dan included. Coming into Abbey on lap one Dan made a move on both Cormac O'Neill and Antti Buri but had to take avoiding action as a Jamun came across the track. Unfortunately the damp track caught him out and he ended up running onto the grass and dropping well down the field. By the end he had worked himself back up to 12th.
Race two saw another bad start but Dan was at the back of a 4 car train which he was confident he could have raced, however a safety car was brought out on lap three by a clash between two back markers and was only brought in for the final lap, meaning he never got a chance to try to work his way back through.
Race three saw a better start but a safety car on the first lap meant that he had to wait to try to apply some pressure. When the race was resumed Dan found himself behind a group of fiercely battling cars and there was simply no space to get past.
Comments:
"Frustrating weekend, didn't get ourselves where we needed to be in testing and carried that over into the races, was looking forward to some wet racing which never came. It was good to be able to find so much time in quali, but had we been able to do those times in testing it would have given us much more to build on. The whole weekend was spent much further back than I wanted but that was all the pace I could find, I'd come up against groups and struggle to get past all of them and get caught up in battles rather than being able to make a break. All this was particularly frustrating after being so quick on the new Arena circuit, rather hoping we get to do that next year."