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Rockingham Offers Mixed FOrtunes For Metcalfe |
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Tuesday, 24 April 2007 |
Fourth position during the third round of the 2007 Formula Renault UK Championship at Rockingham Motor Speedway today proved to be the highlight of the weekend for AKA Cobra ace Jeremy Metcalfe, the 19-year-old disappointed to miss out on a podium finish.
Having qualified for both of the weekend’s 16-lap encounters in fourth position, the Fleet driver had high hopes of challenging for the podium in each race and although an attempt at taking third place on lap two of the day’s first outing almost paid off, Jeremy sensibly and maturely settled for fourth position rather than risking any incident.
“I’m relatively happy with fourth place, we qualified fourth and so to
come home in the same position isn’t so bad”, said Jeremy, “I took it
easy for the last five or six laps to make sure there were no problems.
I could have tried to take third but it would have meant pushing very
hard and that would have meant too much risk, it wasn’t worth it.”
Round four, however, turned into a race the BRDC Rising Star would
rather forget with an eventual 11th place finish not at all
representative of his true pace. After losing out badly on the opening
lap at Deene Hairpin and being pushed down to eighth place, a further
difficulty on lap 14 saw him drop another three positions.
“I’m very disappointed with the second race”, added Jeremy, “I lost out
big time on the first lap and things didn’t improve from there. It’s a
long championship though and we’ve still got 16 races to go so there
are a lot of points up for grabs. I’m sure we’ll be back on form at
Thruxton in a couple of weeks, I’m aiming for nothing less than two
podiums.”
With 22 points for fourth position in round three and 10 points for his
11th place finish in round four at Rockingham’s 1.95-mile International
Super Sports Car Circuit, Jeremy is now fourth in the 2007 Formula
Renault UK Championship standings.
The next race meeting of the season takes place two weeks from now,
5th/6th May, and sees Jeremy return to his ‘home’ circuit, Thruxton,
for the fifth and sixth rounds of the campaign. Pre-race testing took
place earlier this month at the Hampshire venue so competitors will go
directly into qualifying on the opening day of the event.
Provisional 2007 Formula Renault UK Championship Standings (after Rds3&4)
1st Duncan Tappy, 128pts; 2nd Dean Smith, 104pts; 4th Jeremy Metcalfe, 82pts
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