Two top tens with broken tailbone for battler Dan Welch

The pain from his fractured coccyx moved him to tears before he’d completed a lap in anger, but Dan Welch fought back to net two top 10 finishes in an impressive Silverstone showing.

The Welch Motorsport man suffered the injury in a 6.5G head-on collision with Andy Neate at the last round at Rockingham, which forced him out of the rest of the meeting.

He had just two weeks to recuperate, but fought through the pain barrier to finish all three races in the points in his Proton Persona.

But as Welch explained to TouringCarTimes, the injury almost stopped him in his tracks after just one lap.

He said: “To start off we put some extra sponge in the seat, and in first practice I actually started crying on the out lap. It went past pain. It was coming down my arms and everything.

“We put some extra cushions in and I started taking lots of drugs! The medical team have been brilliant. They had this new tool as well, a hot-cold treatment, where they have been freezing my tailbone.

“It has all really helped. Without that I would have really struggled.”

After qualifying 14th and finishing 13th in race one, Welch moved forward to ninth in the second race, and also netted a 10th in the finale.

The third race also featured an eye-catching move on the two West Surrey Racing BMW 125i cars of Rob Collard and Nick Foster, at the end of the Wellington Straight.

Welch said: “I think it’s the first time I’ve finished all three races this year. The third race was really uncomfortable – I think the drugs were wearing off, and I wasn’t allowed any more!

“It was tough. The car wasn’t quite there. It was about half a tenth, and we didn’t quite have enough to keep going forwards.”

On the battle with the BMWs, he added: “That was tight. I was quite lucky that Nick left room, as he saw me coming, and I was committed. It was close, as it all could have gone horribly wrong.

“We struggled a bit with straight line speed in the third race, and I was a bit of a sitting duck for Morgan and Goff. They were on the softer tyre as well. But we are pretty happy.”