Heading into the fourth round of the American Le Mans Series at Salt Lake, I held a 21 point lead in the LMP1 class with Patrón Highcroft team mate Scott Sharp. Despite some setbacks, second and our third podium finish in four rounds at the Miller Motorsports Park keeps us 17 points ahead of Gil de Ferran and Simon Pagenaud as we head towards the halfway point in the season.

Going to Salt Lake we felt that we had a pretty good understanding of the car and how to get the best out of the Michelin tyres. During practice the track temperature changed quite a bit and that played a key role in deciding the set-up. We were fastest in the two practice sessions and looking strong for qualifying.

We made a change for qualifying but it didn't work out and I had too much understeer, which is a killer around that circuit. We secured a front row grid slot with second but the gap of seven tenths of a second between me and Simon wasn't representative. I pushed too hard in the last corner so I should have only been a couple of tenths behind.

We made some set-up changes in the warm up on Sunday as we felt we were too stiff so we went softer and found some more mid-corner grip. The key thing on the start was to make sure Jon Field didn't get in front of us which he unfortunately did. He was sixth on the grid and we knew he'd be up front by turn one because of the power advantage that the turbos have at that altitude.

Scott got held up and we lost quite a bit of time. Once Scott got past Jon it was a case of trying to hold on and not lose too much time.

Scott came into the pits to change over and it all went wrong from there really. His left lap belt adjustor was broken so when I got in it was really hard to do the belts up because they were too tight to secure.

When I was finally done up and the car dropped I didn't realise that it was in neutral and when I put it in first to drive off I stalled, so that didn't help. Then when I got on to the pit straight I realised that my left shoulder belt wasn't fastened. That meant I either had to return to the pits or try and sort it myself.

I knew that if I had to pit again we'd lose even more time so I had no option but to slow right down and try to get the belt into the tiny buckle hole. It wasn't much fun and took about half a lap, losing 30 seconds or more.

Finally getting up to race pace, I could only focus on trying to catch Simon. I clawed back around 12 seconds, which showed our pace, but we still had a lot to do. The Acura felt pretty good so we agreed we should double stint the tyres in an effort to gain time.