Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography
Hitech GP’s Alex Dunne said his first weekend in GB3 was not up to the standards he expects from himself, but remains optimistic of fighting at the front this season.
The reigning British Formula 4 champion had an incident-filled opening two races at Oulton Park after a difficult qualifying.
A late red flag came to his aid in race one after damaging his front wing in a collision with Arthur Rogeon, leaving him sixth in the final classification, but an excursion across the grass at Cascades in a rain-affected second encounter dropped him to 13th.
“The results kind of speak for themselves,” Dunne told Formula Scout. “It hasn’t been exactly the most ideal weekend. Not a weekend that would go by my standard, normally I’m a bit better than this.
“Qualifying didn’t go how we wanted it to, there were a couple of issues. Also I didn’t really put the perfect lap together and then on my last push lap I was improving until I met traffic, so I suffered a little bit from that.
“I think after qualifying it was damage limitation. Race one wasn’t too bad. I think I maximised what I could have done and got the most points that were available for myself. But race two was a stupid mistake so completely my fault and sorry to the team for that.
“I went into Turn 3, pressed the brake a little bit too hard and locked up and then couldn’t get the wheel to unlock so I went off. The spray was really, really bad for the first couple of laps. I couldn’t see anything at all. It was pretty tricky.”
He gained nine places to finish 10th in the revered-grid contest, leaving Oulton Park seventh in the standings.
“The dirty air in these cars is really bad, especially through Turn 1 and Turn 3 and also in the last sector as well, you really get a lot of understeer when you are following, so it makes it really difficult to overtake.”
Despite the tricky start, Dunne remains confident heading into the next round at Silverstone.
“The other tracks we’ve tested at the pace has been pretty strong. The pace has been strong here as well but we got limited by traffic in qualifying So it’s almost like getting the bad weekend out of the way now.
“Definitely as we move on we’ll get closer and closer and I still feel pretty confident that we can fight at the front. I’m not going to let the head get down, I still feel like we can do well.”