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Dani Clos

This young Catalan made his racing debut in Spain’s Formula Junior 1600 Championship in 2004. Dani Clos then spent the next two seasons in Formula Renault and he won the 2006 Italian series for Jenzer Motorsport.

Formula 3

He graduated to the Formula 3 Euroseries for the following season when his Signature Plus Dallara F305-Mercedes-Benz scored three top-five finishes, including fourth on his local Barcelona circuit. A second F3 season in 2008 was with Prema Powerteam and included podium finishes at Pau (third) and the Le Mans Bugatti circuit (second) – benefiting on both occasions from the reversed grid for the second race of the weekend.

Formula 1 test and GP2 graduation

Despite a generally disappointing campaign, Clos tested a Williams FW30B-Toyota that winter and graduated to GP2 in 2009. That was with Racing Engineering although it proved another erratic campaign that was punctuated by accidents. He did qualify seventh on the Valencia street circuit (before crashing) and was on the front row for the Algarve finale. He spun out of contention in race one before climbing from ninth on the grid to finish third in the following day’s sprint race.

Clos stayed with the team for a second GP2 season and seemed to learn from his 2009 experiences. Consistent throughout, he qualified on pole position at Monaco and won the Istanbul sprint race. Fourth in the championship, he then won the final race of the shortened 2011 Asian Series (run at Imola due to unrest in Bahrain).

His third GP2 season with Racing Engineering included second-place finishes in Barcelona and Silverstone’s sprint races but Clos struggled with the new Pirelli tyres. Ninth may have been another underwhelming return but he ended 2011 testing for HRT in the Abu Dhabi young driver Formula 1 test.

Reserve driver for HRT

He joined HRT in 2012 as its reserve driver and tested for the back-of-the-grid squad at six Grands Prix that year. He also started four GP2 races for Barwa Addax with 11th in Bahrain his only finish. That was as close as he came to graduating to F1 for he returned to GP2 in the middle of 2013 with MP Motorsport. It was a largely frustrating campaign until Clos scored a double points score at the final weekend in Abu Dhabi including a close second in the sprint race.

He started a couple of races at Assen in the short-lived Acceleration FA1 series during 2014 and raced in the European Le Mans Series and North American Lamborghini Trophy during 2019.

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