With the focus now squarely on qualifying after a few difficult weekends, Dan performed brilliantly, qualifying in 6th for race one and 8th in race two, his best qualifying performance so far by a long way. This was in spite of brushing a tyre bale on his second flying lap which prevented any improvement.
Race one started well with Dan getting up to 5th place at the start, however a mistake at the last corner on the first lap dropped him back to 6th behind Tio Ellinas. After a poor qualifying Dennis Lind was also charging through the pack and Dan couldn’t keep him behind, dropping him to 7th where he finished.
Race two started badly, with a slipping clutch preventing a good getaway. He then struggled for pace, dropping a couple of places until a heavy crash by Chrissy Palmer brought out the red flags. The restart was hampered by the same clutch issues and in spite of running the last couple of laps right on Antti Buri’s gearbox he could not find a way past, eventually finishing in 10th place.
Comments from Dan:
“While it was nice to be able to show some of our pace in quali the races weren’t really up to scratch. It’s easy to be over critical in this kind of situation, for sure I need to raise my game if I’m going to race at the sharp end of the grid but for the first weekend where we had some of our testing pace it didn’t go too badly. There is still some work to do to understand how the tyres develop over a weekend but we’ve come a long way from the start of the year. Next outing is at Rockingham which was a disaster last year so there is unfinished business there, thankfully we’ve got a couple of days testing so plenty of time to get up to speed!”