Alex Lynn fought back to take two points-scoring finishes in the FIA Formula 3 European Championship round at the Nurburgring after being hugely disappointed in qualifying.
On the heels of his best-ever weekend in the European championship at the Norisring, which included a win and two further podium finishes, 19-year-old Lynn suffered one of his worst starts to a race event when he qualified narrowly outside the top 10 for each of the three Nurburgring races.
While his result in race one (14th) was disappointing, he showed better speed and this was reflected in the subsequent two races, where he improved vastly to finish in seventh and sixth places in his Prema Powerteam Dallara-Mercedes.
We had a bad free practice and we were pretty uncompetitive there, he said. I was struggling a lot with car performance problems all weekend. I just couldnt get it hooked up where I wanted and it took a while to get it right.
It was really strange. I suffered a lot with understeer all weekend and we had to work hard to get it set up the way I liked.
By the third race, where he ran in the train disputing third place, Lynn felt that had he been in clear air he could have matched pacesetting Prema team-mates Raffaele Marciello and Lucas Auer, who finished first and second. Id like to think that in clear air I could post the same lap times as Lello and Lucas, he said. It was a fairly good recovery and I had some good pace by the end.
Alex had made a good start to race one, but an error at Turn 7 cost him time and dropped him several positions to 14th. I dropped off the back of Tom Blomqvist, who was in front of me, to see what the lap times would be like and that was the first inkling we had that we were going the right way with the car, he said.
Some entertaining action in race two featured passes on Harry Tincknell in the opening corners, on Michael Lewis at Turn 1 on the second lap and on Felix Serralles around the outside of Turn 1 with three laps remaining. That allowed Lynn to finish seventh, hard on the heels of Sven Muller.
In race three Alex rose to sixth on the opening lap, but there was stalemate in the close-packed quintet disputing third place, with Lynn unable to chisel an opening to pass Felix Rosenqvist and Lewis hovering in his mirrors throughout.
The second race was a lot better, said Alex, and I made a few good moves. Generally, my first laps have been really good over the weekend, but in this race it was possible to overtake throughout because some people read the conditions wrong on set-up.
It was impossible to do that in the third race though, and anyone would have had to have made a big mistake to be overtaken. Still, our pace was a lot better than at the start of the weekend and weve come a long way in terms of speed.
As a result of the Nurburgring round, Lynn has lost his third place in the championship to Auer, and there is a long five-week gap until the next round at the Dutch circuit of Zandvoort on 27th-29th September. But, crucially, there are tests coming up for the Prema team at Mugello, and for the whole European F3 field at Hockenheim.
This weekend has made me really want to push on to the end of the championship and end it in a really strong way, said Alex, who is a member of the MSAs Team UK and the British Racing Drivers Clubs SuperStars programme.
We need to find out at the tests what the problem was and why we were uncompetitive in practice and qualifying, because that made life very difficult for the rest of the weekend. Its especially puzzling because I needed such a different car to my team-mates, so well need to do a lot of hard work.
What I do take as a positive is that, from where we were after qualifying, it looked like Lucas was going to do a lot of damage to my hopes of third in the championship, so to come out only a few points behind is quite encouraging.
