Daniel Lloyd battled his way through a tricky return to the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship at the weekend with contact in the final race of the weekend ending his promising revisit to Oulton Park in Cheshire (June 9/10).
After inking a late deal with Independent team BTC Norlin on Wednesday last week, the Huddersfield driver had a tough task ahead of him heading into the fourth meeting of the season with 45kg of late entry ballast on-board.
Getting behind the wheel of the Honda Civic Type R for the first time on Saturday morning, Lloyd and the BTC Norlin team worked hard to find the best set-up for the Yorkshireman and the best solution to manage the additional weight and were rewarded a competitive car, closely-matching his team-mate Chris Smiley on race pace.
Despite carrying the added ballast on-board and with the Honda struggling with a gear cut issue, Lloyd managed to secure a credible P22 spot in qualifying, against a capacity grid of 32 cars.
“Oulton Park wasn’t the weekend that we hoped for;” said Lloyd. “We struggled with the weight a lot more than we hoped and that really hindered our pace. Oulton is a circuit that’s really hard on your brakes so adding 45kg was always going to make life difficult.
“Unfortunately we picked up a gear cut issue in free practice and qualifying so that dropped us back a bit, but the team did a great job to get it sorted for Sunday and the Civic was handling really well.”
Notoriously tricky for overtaking on, Oulton Park is a tough circuit on the brakes and the weekend’s opening race was damage limitation. With the weight playing havoc on the brakes and Lloyd did well to hold on to take 25th at the flag.
Free of the weight for race 2, the 26-year-old made excellent progress on the narrow circuit, cutting his way cleanly through the pack to claim P17 in the #26 Civic Type R – just outside of the points scoring zone.
“Race 1 was hard going with the weight and we just lost the brakes at the end;” explained Lloyd. “We had good pace in race 2 though and were one of the quickest Swindon-powered cars on the grid. It’s just so tough to overtake there, but we managed to stay out of trouble and all things considered, finishing 17th was a great result.”
Sadly, a huge start-line crash in the final race of the day put paid to Lloyd’s progress, with both BTC Norlin cars unavoidably caught up in the melee and taken out of the contest with race ending damage.
“We were really optimistic for the final race as we’d been getting quicker all day and closer to the points so it was such a shame to get caught up in someone else’s incident. I don’t know what caused the crash, someone just came across and into me on the start finish straight and wiped myself and my team-mate Chris [Smiley] out of the race.”
The Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship heads to Lloyd’s home circuit next – Croft in North Yorkshire – for rounds 13, 14 and 15 on June 22/23. With the #26 Honda Civic Type R heading into the pivotal mid-way meeting of the season free of any weight, Lloyd is hopeful that he’ll be able to challenge for points to help the BTC Norlin team’s championship campaign.
“I’d like to say a big thanks to Bert [Taylor] for offering me the chance to join the team and also massive thanks to the guys for making me feel so welcome. I really enjoyed working with them all this weekend.
“I feel like we made some positive changes to the car to fit me better and I’m really looking forward to heading to Croft without the weight on-board, and seeing what we can do.”
