Dahlgren escapes disaster after standing-start stall

Robert Dahlgren was lucky to be avoided after stalling at the start in the second race at Porto when he stalled on the third row of the grid. The Swedish driver is now looking ahead to Donington Park, when the Polestar Racing Volvo will shed its new car weight.

Dahlgren picked up points with seventh place in the first race, finishing in the same place as he qualified with none of the top eight positions changing in the race.

Starting slightly higher up the order in the second race, the Swede’s Volvo C30 failed to get away when the lights went out, and the field behind did an amazing job to avoid the stranded car with Norbert Michelisz directly behind squeezing down the left-hand side next to the pit wall.

“I was thinking this was going to be a shorter C30,” said Dahlgren to TouringCarTimes on what his thoughts were whilst he was stalled.

“All the man hours have gone into getting the engine running. We have done some practice starts, and some starts are brilliant, and some starts are bad; and this is the worst start I’ve done so far, and unfortunately this was in the race.”

“We were doing good lap times, and we improved from race one to race two, but it’s very hard to overtake around here. Even though I was two seconds a lap quicker than Taniguchi, it’s still very hard to overtake, even though we are quick on the right parts.”

The Volvo is expected to be lose 60kg of ballast for the next round at Donington Park, a track the 2001 British Formula Ford champion knows well. This will be the first time the Volvo has run at low weight with the new 1.6 litre turbocharged engine, and is hoping to close the gap to Chevrolet.

“I think we’re making progress all the time, and Donington is a track I know better and I have high expections from myself, and we have a test coming up as well, so it’ll be brilliant to come back to England and feel at home again.”