Jake Dalton didn’t have the weekend he’d hoped for in the final rounds of the 2012 Protyre Formula Renault BARC Championship at Silverstone, though fourteenth and eighth place finishes were still enough to ensure the MGR Motorsport star concluded the season as the top car-racing rookie in the championship.
The weekend didn’t start to plan, with a qualifying session that Dalton described as his “worst of the year” producing seventh and eighteenth place grid slots for the two encounters.
An average start to the opening race saw Dalton slip to eighth and after briefly working his way back into seventh, a mistake dropped him to eleventh. With a lack of pace stopping him from re-gaining any ground, he crossed the line eleventh, before a five second penalty for exceeding track limits dropping him to fourteenth.
The weekend’s second race, broadcast live on ITV4, saw Dalton producing a lightning start, gaining three places to end the opening lap fifteenth. After a safety car period, Dalton steamed up the inside of two cars into Brooklands, before making light work of the cars in-front to progress into eleventh. Benefitting from a three car incident in front, Dalton was promoted to an eighth place finish, a great result from eighteenth on the grid.
“After such a difficult weekend I’m pleased with the final race,” he said. “We made a lot of changes to the car and seemed to improve the performance, making ten positions is a good gain in a single seater race and I just ran out of laps to progress any further.”
Reflecting on his maiden season, Dalton added: “For my first year out of karting I’m relatively happy but I still expect a lot of myself knowing what I have done in karting and can achieve. Over winter I’ll train hard and make the correct decision ready for a challenge for the championship next year.”
