Wells Looking to Bounce Back in Style
Dan Wells is looking to bounce back in style at the World Series by Renault event at Silverstone after what he proclaimed his ‘worst weekend of the year’ at Snetterton.
The Atech Reid GP driver had a difficult weekend after returning from the seven week summer break only managing eleventh and thirteenth respectively in the two qualifying sessions on Saturday.
“We’ve been out the car for seven weeks the other guys have had a race or kept their hand in somehow and I haven’t had that. So when I got in the car and it was all about getting up to speed again.” Said Wells. “Back in the tests in May I was pretty confident with the circuit. I was looking to coming and get a good result here but we could see on Friday that it wasn’t quite there. I was defiantly unhappy with Friday practice but the qualifying was the worst of the year. We’ve been making progress in eight, seventh or sixth and moving in the right direction and all of a sudden we were eleventh or thirteenth or something crazy. It wasn’t the most memorable of quails to be honest.”
But the Wiltshire based racer bounced back in race one to take a solid tenth place and valuable points.
‘I made a good start and past Jones and nearly passed Powell as well, but I couldn’t quite make it down the inside of her into turn one. From that point on there was a little bit of battling but I had a clean race. We were very consistent in the race, maybe a little too consistent for my liking. Over the last five laps we were as fast as the guys in the group be we hadn’t made the advantage at the beginning but we were on pace. We made a second since yesterday and we were half a second quicker on my qualifying time on tyres that were twenty-five laps old. It shows the performance really wasn’t there Saturday but the performance on Sunday was a step in the right direction.”
In race two Wells started at the back and it wasn’t long before he made progress through the field.
“Race two we made a bad start,” admitted Wells. “Hawksworth got past me and it was quite busy into turn two to say the least! My highlight of the weekend came at turn four, everyone went for the inside so I thought I’d send it and I went around the outside, braked as late as I could and got around the outside of one of the Fortec cars. That was enjoyable, best part of the weekend to be honest. We came through on lap four with three cars in front battling, I stuck my nose down the inside trying to make places and just got my nose chopped off. That sent my tracking out so the car was feeling every interesting under breaking.
“A few other people made some mistake so we made some advantage on them and got past a few people even thought we had damaged the car.”
Despite good progress over the weekend, Wells considered Snetterton be his worst of the year, but with his eye firmly back in he is confident he can deliver in front of a bumper 125,000 Silverstone crowd.
“Worst weekend of the year on one of my favourite tracks which is strange. I’ve defiantly learnt a lot this weekend. It’s usually the case that you learn the most on difficult weekends.
“The only target I’m going to set for Silverstone is going to do my best to put everything together to enable myself to compete in qualifying on the front three rows. I’m defiantly looking to bounce back in style in front of a 125,000 strong crowd and half of Waitrose in Salisbury are coming along to support me as well!
“My eye is defiantly back in and at Silverstone ill be looking for a much better results because is not acceptable from my side.” He concluded.
Photo: Jakob Ebrey
Mike Trusler
