Carlin’s Sacha Fenestraz believes he’s back to where he should have been at the start of the season after a strong weekend at Silverstone.
Fenestraz spent the British round of the European Formula 3 championship battling for the race lead, picking up two second place finishes in his best weekend of the season.
He spent most of the opening race leading the field, but was forced to defend hard against Red Bull junior Daniel Ticktum, with Ticktum eventually making a pass late in the race.
Starting further back in race 2, he managed to climb up to P7 before a strong start in the final race of the weekend allowed him to fight Juri Vips for the victory.
Having only taken 10 points from the past nine races, Fenestraz was pleased with the turn around, but he added that there was still more work to do.
“It’s a good comeback,” he told Read Motorsport. “When we look backwards to the last two race weekends – or the last three race weekends – when we weren’t even close to the top 10.
“I’ve been working really hard with the team, myself as well, to find out all the problems and now we’re fighting for tge top five. That’s where I should have been since the beginning of the season, but it’s not good enough. I’m feeling good.
“We still need to do a lot of work. We saw that Motorpark is still ahead of us. Prema is always there, so we need to keep working to be better than them.”
Fenestraz was the only Carlin driver to enjoy strong results at Silverstone. Team-mates Jehan Daruvala and Ferdinand Habsburg only managed to take two points each, while Nikita Troitsky and Ameya Vaidyanathan suffered pointless weekends.
The Renault junior driver believes a difficult qualifying was to blame for Carlin’s poor results.
“We had some issues,” he said. “I did, but not as much as my team-mates, I would imagine. That obviously helped me.
“Unfortunately, in this championship, if you don’t do a good qualifying, the weekend is nearly done. Even on this track, it’s nearly impossible to overtake so qualifying is key.
“They struggled in qualifying with other issues and I was able to – I think I did a pretty good job, even with those problems, so I’m happy with it and now looking forward to Misano.”
