Quantel BiFold Racing’s Marc Hynes admits that he feels he could have qualified better than tenth for the opening British Touring Car Championship race of the day at Donington Park.
Hynes qualified in tenth for his second meeting in the BTCC, and admits that he is slightly disappointed with his performance, despite claiming the position of the best rookie.
“I thought we should have done a bit better than that to be honest,” said Hynes to TouringCars.Net. “I didn’t do a great first run and then we didn’t really do a run after that, so I’m a bit disappointed – I’ve got higher hopes than P10. We’ve got two very nice sets of prepped tyres for racing so we’ll just have to get stuck in tomorrow.”
Hynes is optimistic for the first race, and acknowledges that he has plenty of overtaking to do around the Donington Park National circuit if he is to achieve a result he is happy with.
“There’s a lot of overtaking opportunities and we’ve got plenty [of people] to overtake still,” added Hynes. “I just need to concentrate on the starts and get up and running and through the first lap. I think here the rears aren’t that easy to get temperature into because you’re not really using them very hard, particularly the right-rear through the Craners. We’ll have to get the rear-tyres up to temperature as best as we can.”
Hynes admits that he still has to work on his qualifying performance, after he ended the session as the third-best MG driver, 0.585 seconds off team-mate Jason Plato and 0.349 seconds behind Sam Tordoff in third.
“I just have to learn how it works and we’ve hopefully got a bit better pace than P10. I think I’ve just got to really focus on getting qualifying right and being where the car is capable of being on the grid. It’s always tough when you’re learning something and you end up in these mid-field battles, but you learn a lot from it.
“Front-wheel drive is something that’s not familiar to me so I’ve got to learn how best to bring them in, for example by warming the rears up on the front, and I’m learning a lot about that in the last few weeks. Then it’s [about] just nailing a lap when you get them on.”
Race one takes place at 11:37 BST.