Rob Austin declared himself pleased to put his recent run of bad form behind him with three solid points scoring finishes at Knockhill.

The HMS Racing driver headed to Scotland having failed to score in two of the three races at Rockingham in the previous meeting, but came away from the eighth round of the BTCC campaign having scored in all three races for the first time in his weekend with his Alfa Romeo Giulietta.

Quick throughout practice, Austin qualified in 13th place before the team was forced into an engine change overnight as a legacy of damage sustained at Rockingham.

With the new engine in place, Austin took 14th place in the opening race of the weekend before fighting his way forwards to eleventh in race two – a result that would ultimately become a sixth top ten finish of the season when Ash Sutton and Tom Ingram were excluded from the results.

A 13th place finish in race three ensured a solid end to a tricky race day, with Austin pleased to come away from the weekend having avoided getting caught up in any incidents on track.

“I think if the races had been dry we had really good pace, solid top ten pace, so there would’ve been an opportunity for more in terms of the results perhaps,” he said. “In the wet we were lacking under braking, we seemed to have a bit of a weak spot there – I think half the problem was me and half the car, I didn’t have the confidence I needed so we were vulnerable there.

“I was happy with race one and in race two the car felt a chunk better with some changes, instead of trying to hang on I knew we could move forward – but you couldn’t see anything! The amount of water hanging in the air was crazy, so I was kind of relieved to finish. The new surface at Knockhill is mega, it provided a lot of grip and the drainage was very good, we didn’t have any aquaplaning.

“We went further with the changes to the car for race three, and possibly got it a bit wrong. We were really lacking front-end for the first half of the race, but as everyone started to struggle with tyres later on we had good pace. Compared to what’s happened recently with some of the bad luck, it’s been good to have a relatively good, incident-free weekend.”