Despite a classic track and beautiful surroundings, round two of the 2015 VdeV Series proved to be anything but pleasant for Garry Findlay as he suffered another disappointing result with the CD Sport team.

After a DNF in the opening round of the season in Barcelona, Findlay and his team-mates hoped for a better run over the 6 Hours of Mugello, but ran into familiar problems as they tried to get the #32 Norma onto the pace.

Things looked promising in practice, where Findlay was regularly in the top three, but got worse as the weekend went, initially with understeer plaguing the car’s handling before loose bodywork eventually put paid to its race while lying 17th overall. More frustratingly for the Briton, however, were some of the decisions taken by the team, including sending him out for qualifying with 5kg more fuel than the sister cars, despite all being on the same run plan, and an unexplained change of race set-up that saw the driver’s suspicions confirmed when the body worked loose late in the race.

“The less said about Mugello the better,” Findlay sighed, “The whole weekend was problematic one way or another, but really came to a head in the race when, on checking the loose bodywork, I noticed that the set-up had been changed without anyone telling the drivers….

“The bodywork was already loose when I took over for the last stint, but gradually began lifting more and more on the right-hand side and it’s getting frustrating to have issues like this, as the drivers clearly have the pace to run towards the front. We went from eleventh on the grid to fourth in the space of a lap at the start, but the understeer that had plagued us in practice returned soon after and finding the altered set-up just made things worse. It’s especially galling as CD Sport clearly go well at Mugello, and the other two cars finished first and fourth while we’re struggling with handling problems at the other end of the top ten.”

Round three of the 2015 VdeV Series takes place over six hours at Motorland Aragon in Spain over the weekend of 29-31 May.