Alex MacDowall saw his hopes of a maiden Yokohama Independents’ victory disappear after a brace of difficult races during rounds five and six of the 2012 World Touring Car Championship on the streets of Marrakech, Morocco.
The bamboo engineering driver has shown strong pace throughout the weekend and looked set for a brace of Yokohama Independent podium finishes after qualifying second in class for round five.
The weekend started off on a positive note for MacDowall as he posted the fifth fastest time during testing on Friday, 13 April, and his Friday pace carried on in qualifying as he missed out on the class pole by four hundredths of a second.
MacDowall finished the first part of qualifying eleventh overall and fourth of the Yokohama Independent runners and he then set a best time of 1m44.544s, leaving him seventh overall and second in class – this would become sixth after Gabriele Tarquini was demoted to twelfth for both races.
This was made all the more impressive as MacDowall only had one set of tyres left for the second part of qualifying: “We had to use more tyres in the first part of qualifying just to get through as the works cars were much quicker”, explained Alex, “I could only afford one run in Q2 but I was happy with how it turned out, we were only just pipped to the Independents pole – it was really close.”
Round five saw the Carlisle based racer get involved in an unfortunate incident and this left him at the back of the field. He recovered to twelfth overall and sixth in class, which secured him vital Yokohama Independent trophy points.
Having held his position off the rolling start, MacDowall was in the slipstream of the ROAL Motorsport BMW 320TC of Tom Coronel heading up to the second chicane. MacDowall was caught out by Coronel braking earlier than expected and this lost the twenty one year old a massive amount.
Having recovered twenty first and last, MacDowall fought back to recover three vital points in the hunt for the Yokohama Independents’ Trophy.
“I had a really good slipstream behind [Tom] Coronel, he was holding a very defensive line but he braked early and it caught me out”, reflected Alex, “I locked-up the fronts and had to run straight on, as it was so narrow there on that part of the track I had to reverse as well before rejoining so it lost me a lot of time. I did recover quite well though and was happy to get back in the points.”
Round six lasted a single lap for MacDowall. Having lined up fifth overall and on Pole for the Yokohama Independents’, but a driveshaft issue forced the British racer into retirement.
“It’s not been a helpful couple of races for the championship, just one of those weekends really, but we know we’ve got the speed”, commented the Cumbrian racer, “Now it’s all about everything coming together for us, we had good pace this weekend but the races just didn’t work out. We just need to keep working hard; performing well in qualifying and then the rest will follow.”
Despite the tough weekend, MacDowall finds himself fifth in the Yokohama Independents’ and eleventh in the overall Championship hunt. Next up for MacDowall is a trip to Slovakia and the Slovakia Ring over the 28/29 April.