Dan Eaves - Team Halfords

After winning the Independent's cup last year, Dan Eaves finds himself as the senior driver at Team Halfords. His experience will prove invaluable as the team work to turn their all-new Peugeot 307s into serious contenders. It has been a tough start to the year, but at Thruxton both cars finished the first race with Dan picking up 2 hard earned points for 9th place. He spoke to us after the race.

I understand you did some testing last week, did you gain anything useful?

No, not exactly! We went down to Pembury, we took all the team and the two cars, rolled one out of the garage first thing in the morning and did three laps then had an electrical problem straight away.

We then spent the whole day trying to solve the problem, but it was unresolvable. Carl's car did about thirty laps then had the same problem, which is slightly frustrating to say the least when you've got everything in place to make changes to the car and then you can't.

So we've come here, which is probably the most difficult circuit in the country, obviously having done no testing and with a new tyre which is a different construction. We've basically started from scratch which is very difficult, but I'm very very pleased to get 9th in the first race.

It was good for you and Carl to both get to the line after some of the troubles you've had.

Well yes, at this stage of the season all we've got to look at is getting some results, and getting the cars to the finish. We've got a lot of improvements to come with them, lots of scope for development, so when we go to Silverstone the car should be quicker, and as we move on through the season we'll get better and better.

It's encouraging that we're getting results at the moment, hopefully we'll get faster and faster and win some races.

When do you think it'll be realistic to start challenging for podiums, or even wins?

Well I was hoping for Silverstone, but I'm not sure if we'll have made improvements by then to be fighting for the top three positions, but certainly we'll be up in the top eight. Probably by July time is when you'll really see the car blossoming - as it were - and getting up to the sharp end of the grid.

With all the other things that VLR does - not the least of which is preparing 307s for Team Varta - does that perhaps stretch the team a bit too much?

It's not too bad because the scope for development on the production cars isn't so great: you're not working out ways of changing manufacturer's parts. It's really just in the setup of those cars, so Vic sits down before a race weekend and goes though that with [the team] and works out a game plan, and as it happens Tom [Boardman] went out quickest and has remained so all weekend.

In that respect it's no strain on us at all - it's only Vic's brain that they're after!



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