The 9th round in Monza has had this weekend a bittersweet flavour for Dani Clos. After rounds 7th and 8th, the spanish driver came to Monza eager looking forward to score in top positions and doing his best.
The weekend was full of ups and downs. Despite some incidents, Clos closed another couple of races full of overtakes and comebacks at the legendary circuit of Monza, proving that he never gives up.
The Friday Clos qualified in an excellent P7, considering that this was his third round after his return to GP2. The driver evidenced that he was fully adapted to the car and team MP Motorsport.
Unfortunately the bad news came after the decision of marshalls to exclude Clos from the Qualifying due to was not possible to take the minimum fuel quantity from the sample mandatory for the checking. The marshalls allowed Clos to start the race in last position in the starting grid.
Starting the featured race on Saturday, he managed to pass 7 cars before ending the first lap. Unfortunately in the second lap an accident involving several cars in the first was unavoidable for Clos when he was going in P19, as a result of this, Clos got his front wing damaged and was forced to enter to pit to get that changed. When he returned to track he did it in last place with a gap of one lap, despite this incident, Clos was one of the fastest drivers on track, but he only could finish in P18.
On Sunday in the second race, Clos has repeated a great start and overtook 6 cars before completing the first sector, performing another fantastic comeback until P10 before completing lap 1. After a hard fight with Canamasas from lap 7, he was going on P9 before completing lap 9. He was going very fast to reach Cecotto in order to fight for 8th position, the first scoring position in that second race, he tried to overtake Cecotto in couple of times but he could not hunt the 8th position finishing at 0,5 s from the venezuelan driver.
Dani Clos: ” This has been a quite hard weekend, I arrived to Monza with so many expectations and it seemed all was going good, the Qualifying on Friday was going OK too, we were in P2 during half session and finally we got P7, unfotunately due to a lack of 0,5 l in the sample fuel, the stewards penalized to me and sent me to the last position P26.”
“This way, the race of Saturday seemed to be very complicated starting from the last place. Starting from last place it is more likely to bump into an issue in front of you, and this what finally happened, I could not manage to avoid an accident at the first corner. We were perfectly aware that we had enough rhythm to reach the five head positions, but unluckily, races not always end like you wish.”
“Today’s race has been quite positive in a general view, I started in P18 and finished P9 and managed to pass 7 or 8 cars in the start and the race rhythm has been quite good. I hope to be at Singapur to keep improving and finally run a net round withouth incidents.”
Dani Clos Media