Drive shaft problem spoils Thruxton weekend for Welch

The Proton of Dan Welch ran only a few laps at the Thruxton circuit, with a drive shaft problem ending his weekend early.

Welch was not out in Saturday morning’s FP1 session, but managed to finish tenth in FP2 in spite of only running four laps. The Proton was out on track in the early stages of qualifying but did not set a lap time after failing to meet ride height. The dramas continued for Welch on Sunday as he pulled off circuit on the race one outlap, not contesting the race and withdrawing from races two and three.

Welch had the following to say to TouringCarTimes about the issue after making the withdrawal: “We’ve had a problem with braking front drive shafts. Basically what it has done is it has put a hole in the gearbox and we don’t have a spare and there’s nothing spare available so that’s it really. We need to go away and work out what our problem is. We’re not really sure why the problem has occurred, we’ve got to get to the bottom of why we’re getting this problem. We’ve not changed anything on the car fundamentally that would effect it so we’re not sure. It’s only been this weekend; we’ve never had a problem with it before. I don’t know, we’ll go away and lick our wounds”

Welch was particularly disappointed with the way his weekend turned out given he was hoping to be strong at Thruxton: “I would have like to have felt strong. We’ve not got the strongest engine in the field but this is one of my strongest circuits personally. In the little testing we did, we only did one-and-a-half flying laps and that put us tenth in second practice. We felt with the package we were going to be strong, but there we go.”

As to whether the drive shaft issue would be resolved before the next round of the British Touring Car Championship to be held at Oulton Park, Welch had the following to say: “Hopefully. We don’t know at the minute. We don’t know where the problem actually is apart from that it keeps reoccurring. We’re just pretty depressed about the whole thing. There’s a bit of work to do between now and then. There’s a little bit of time, but we’re quite busy. We’re doing the Nürburgring 24 hours and a couple of other things. So we’re going to be pretty flat out.”