ALEX LYNN fought back to take two point-scoring finishes in the FIA Formula 3 European Championship round at 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 couldn't 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 under-steer 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 pace-setting Prema team-mates Raffaele Marciello and Lucas Auer, who finished first and second.
"I'd 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."
Lynn had made a good start to race one, but an error at turn seven 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.
Entertaining action in race two featured passes on Harry Tincknell in the opening corners, on Michael Lewis at turn one on the second lap and on Felix Serralles around the outside of turn one with three laps remaining.
That allowed Lynn to finish seventh, hard on the heels of Sven Muller.
In race three, Lynn 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 Lynn. "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."
