Darryl O’Young loses out with drive-through penalty

Darryl O’Young was one of four drivers hit with a drive-through penalty in Round 7, after the stewards began to take action against cars which were deemed to be cutting the track.

Several cars were warned throughout practice to respect the track limits, with the black & white unsportsmanship behaviour flag brought out on a few occassions to warn the drivers.

Into the evening on Saturday, even both the front-row starters were also under investigation, with the possibility of a grid demotion for the RML Chevrolets of Alain Menu and Yvan Muller, but no penalty was eventually given.

During the first race, Bamboo Engineering’s Darryl O’Young, Proteam’s Mehdi Bennani and SUNRED’s Aleksei Dudukalo & Michel Nykjaer were all served with drive-through penalties for cutting the track at turn four with little warning.

“The decision to give Darryl the drive through penalty was the thing that compromised our weekend,” said Bamboo Engineering Team Principal Richard Coleman.

“It was an outrageous decision and for fear of doing a Lewis Hamilton and ending up in trouble with the Race Stewards I’ll say no more.”

For O’Young this was disastrous. The Hong Kong driver had made a similar error to Rob Huff in qualifying trying to gain a good position in the reverse top ten, but missed out and had to start in 11th position for both races. A good start for O’Young saw the Bamboo Engineering Chevrolet driver up to eighth place, fending off the recovering ROAL Motorsport BMW 320 TC of Tom Coronel, but the drive through dropped him down to 14th and out of the overall points paying positions.

“We always try to aim for the middle of (the top ten), and definitely not go out there and do a maximum lap,” said O’Young to TouringCarTimes.

“We weren’t backing off that much, but it’s just kind of not doing that well for the perfect lap, but it cost us this time.”

“If we’d been a tenth quicker we’d have been P7, it’s a bit of a lottery now and we got caught out.”

In race two, O’Young fought up to 8th place to pick up four points in the championship and six points in the Yokohama Independents’ Trophy. As a result of the low scoring weekend, O’Young slipped from joint third to fourth in the trophy standings, behind Proteam Racing’s Javier Villa and the local star, Zengö Motorsport driver Norbert Michelisz.

Yokohama Independents’ Trophy Standings after Hungary