Daniel Lloyd remains in contention for the Independent drivers’ title in the British Touring Car Championship, despite an ‘average’ weekend at Knockhill that saw him manage a best finish of 12th.
Lloyd went to Scotland keen to bounce back from engine issues which blighted his weekend at Croft, and landed him with a £24,000 repair bill following damage to his car’s power unit.
However, despite promising practice pace, Lloyd qualified in 12th for the first race, missing out on progression to Q2 by just 0.051 seconds, although when Daniel Rowbottom was later excluded he was promoted into a grid position in the top dozen.
With the medium compound tyre on his Hyundai for race one, Lloyd was unable to make progress and after being shuffled out in the pack early on, he ultimately finished down in 16th.
In race two on the soft tyre, Lloyd improved to 15th, and second in the Independents class, before improving further in the final race of the day when he took the chequered flag in 12th, behind Restart Racing team-mate Chris Smiley.
Despite losing ground to his class rivals on an ‘average’ weekend, Lloyd has only dropped three points to the top of the Independents’ standings, leaving him relatively optimistic ahead of the final three events of the year.
“The pace we showed in practice on the new tyre was really good but then we missed out on making it through Q1 by a tenth of a second in qualifying which put us in the middle pack for race day,” explained Lloyd.
“We missed a trick a little bit with the set-up for the races and with the warm weather, we ended up having to deal with understeer in the race and struggled to really get the best from the front tyres.
“We worked to improve the car but the fact we were running in traffic all the time and not in clean air meant we had to deal with trying to keep the engine temperatures down – particularly given what happened at Croft.
“It’s been an average weekend in terms of the overall results, but we’ve been able to score good points in the Independents’ championship which is important, and we know we’ll be stronger at the circuits we still have to come.”