Two alternator failures stopped Robert Dahlgren in Falkenberg qualifying

Robert Dahlgren’s running in the third part of qualifying at Falkenberg was cut short by an alternator failure, which also led to a loss of power steering, his PWR Racing team has confirmed.

It was the first time this season that championship leader Dahlgren had failed to make it into the final segment, and served as a blow to his aspirations in Sunday’s three races.

Dahlgren’s original alternator had also failed prior to qualifying, which meant they were forced to use the back-up in Q1 and Q2.

The knock-on effect of the second failure caused electrical issues and an outage of the power steering and a number of sensor mis-readings, which resulted in Dahlgren going off-track towards the end of Q2.

The problem was rectified before Sunday’s warm-up in which Dahlgren posted the fastest time, ahead of PWR team-mate Daniel Haglöf. Nevertheless, Dahlgren was left ruing a costly mechanical gremlin.

“Yesterday we had a problem with the alternator, and that affected the power steering. It was something was cutting the steering like a switch,” Dahlgren told TouringCarTimes.

“It was really difficult to drive with it, I missed a lot of the lines. That was one of the reasons why we couldn’t really challenge the VWs for the top positions.”

“It’s solved now and we’ve made some really good changes. We’re moving forwards all the time so it feels pretty good.”

The SEAT driver struggled with the handling of his car and was fortunate enough to manage fifth for race one and fourth for the second race. Having made it through to Q3, Dahlgren will start the third race from fifth.

“It was so tight in qualifying, so for sure without the problem we could have challenged them better than we did.”