Daniel Lloyd produced a battling display at Brands Hatch to score three points finishes from the second meeting of the Kwik Fit British Touring Car Championship season.
Huddersfield-based Daniel headed into the weekend looking to try and push for a first top-ten finish at the wheel of his Team HARD-run Cupra Leon, having found himself out of luck during the opening meeting at Donington Park.
Two difficult practice sessions in tricky damp conditions saw Daniel back in 20th on the timesheets, with the team working hard to make changes to the car ahead of qualifying.
Despite worsening weather conditions and no fewer than three red flags, the changes worked well as Daniel fought his way into the Top Ten Showdown before qualifying in ninth place on the grid.
Race day would be run in dry conditions which provided Daniel with a fresh challenge, as he embarked on his first dry races at the wheel of the Cupra.
After an early incident forced race one to be halted, Daniel stayed out on trouble on the restart with a solid run that saw him sit inside the top ten throughout, crossing the line in tenth place to score his best result of the season so far.
The second race of the weekend would see Daniel lose out to a number of drivers who were running the soft compound option tyre, but he was still able to add more points to his total as he crossed the line in 14th spot, with hopes high of a strong end to race day when he bolted the soft tyres onto the Cupra for race three.
Although he was able to achieve that goal by fighting his way to eleventh spot, Daniel was hampered by a lack of straight-line speed but will now look to take the lessons learned into the next event at Snetterton in two weeks time.
“I’d say it’s been an average weekend in terms of the results, but like after Donington, there are positives for us to take away from it,” he said. “We’ve taken a big step forward with the set-up for the car as we showed in qualifying, although I think we still have a bit of work to do in the dry.
“Because it was our first real running in the dry conditions on race day, we went into it a little bit blind and I don’t think we quite went far enough with the changes we made going into race one. We made more changes as the day went on and I think we were a lot closer to where we wanted to be by the end of race three, although there seemed to be something going on with the engine that cost us straight-line speed.
“Looking at the bigger picture, this has almost been like a dry test for us and a chance to try out different things. What we need to do now is refine what we have and focus on moving forwards.”
