Petronas SRT’s Jake Dixon has a lot of work to do from 32nd on the CatalanGP grid tomorrow after a Q1 crash curtailed his progress at Barcelona this afternoon.
Having struggled throughout Friday, Dixon’s woes continued in Saturday practice and he was unable to improve upon his fastest time from the previous morning. His best lap of FP3 – a 1’44.409 – placed him 21st in both the session and the combined times and he was forced to prepare for the Q1 fight.
The disappointment didn’t end there, however, as Dixon crashed on his opening hot-lap after carrying too much speed through turn five, with the damage too much to repair before the end of the 15-minute session.
“Obviously not an ideal situation crashing on the first flying lap in Q1,” the down to earth Brit admitted honestly.
“It means we’ll be starting from the back of the grid in tomorrow’s race. I can’t seem to get much luck at the minute, but I’m hoping that we can begin to turn things around and start heading in the direction that we need to be going in.
“I’m hoping that I can get a good start and first few laps tomorrow, and then see how the race unfolds. We might get some people dropping back more than usual because of tyre life issues here, which hopefully I can take advantage of.
“All weekend we’ve been around tenth, but we still need to find something to be 100% ready for the race. Obviously I’d prefer to be more at the front, like we were last year, but now I’m just focusing on a good recovery ride tomorrow.”
