Mark Burdett Motorsports Raoul Owens lost the chance to climb into the top 10 of the Formula Renault 2.0 Northern European Cup standings through no fault of his own at the Nurburgring on Sunday, 21st April, when shunted out of the opening race while challenging inside the top eight.Despite showing excellent pace in the first of the weekends two encounters at the famous German track, the category rookies impressive level of performance wasnt rewarded when contact from a rival, while dicing for position midway through the opening lap, led to substantial rear-end damage.Raoul made a sensational getaway at the beginning of round four, from the cusp of the top 10, and leapt into eighth place at the start but his progress was halted halfway around lap one when French driver Alexander Baron hit the rear of the British racers car at turn eight.Having already passed Baron, Raoul was attempting to stay ahead but the former was determined to brake as late as possible to try and wrest the position back. Running with front-wing damage though, Baron couldnt get his car stopped and he hit the rear of Raouls FR 2.0sending the 18-year-old into an immediate retirement with a broken pushrod.The weekend actually got off to a pretty good start but then went wrong, said Raoul. Qualifying was so tight, just a couple of tenths covered a whole bunch of carsit really was so close. In the first race I got up to about seventh or eighth and was challenging [Alexander] Baron up the hill towards the chicane, he tried to brake late but locked-up as he had no front wing and hit the back of my car.We ended up with a broken pushrod so had to retire, it was really unfortunate and pretty annoying as we could have been top six in the first race. Im confident we had the pace to achieve that and it was looking good while our race lasted!Although able to finish race two, round five, tyre problems dropped the Cape Town-based driver down the order as the action wore on. Making decent progress initially, Raouls race started to come unstuck at around one third distance and as he struggled with his rapidly fading Michelin rubber he had to settle for an eventual finish in 19th position.I made a good start to race two, got a couple of cars off the line and was up into about 10th position but we just struggled for pace after that, explained the Bright Spark Ventures-backer racer, The car was good early on but from about lap five it just dropped off and I had no grip.

We chose to run with our new set of tyres in the first race to try and get as high up the order as we could but the incident wrecked them. So, I had to run the set we used for qualifying in race two and that was a disadvantage. The degradation was quite high and we just had no grip as the race went on. Its frustrating as we had the potential to be in the top six this weekend.Next on the Formula Renault 2.0 NEC calendar is a visit to Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit in the UK, Raouls first outing on British soil since the end of last years Protyre Formula Renault Championship, over the weekend 1st/2nd June.Provisional 2013 Formula Renault 2.0 Northern European Cup Standings (after Rd5):18th Raoul Owens, 22pts