While he admitted his time in Hungary was outwardly “shocking” the progress he and his DAMS Racing team had made left Alex Lynn surprisingly buoyant heading into this weekend’s GP2 Series round at Hockenheim.

His visit to the Hungaroring, for the sixth round of the Formula One feeder series, did little to help the 22-year-old from Dunmow’s hopes of claiming a title that he knows will boost his attempt to secure a race seat in F1 in the next few years.

Lynn was looking to put some poor recent form behind him and knew he had taken pole position and driven to GP2 feature race victory there last year.

However, for a third round out of the last four in the 2016 championship, he failed to claim any points, finishing 12th in the feature race and then crashing out of the following day’s sprint event after being unable to avoid a collision as a car in front of him span out.

It left the Essex driver, who is also a development driver for the Williams Martini Racing F1 team, sitting 11th in the championship standings and 56 points off current leader Pierre Gasly.

He acknowledged that it may not look good from the outside, but felt that was not the true position after significant progress was made in Hungary that boded well for the second half of the season.

“You might be expecting me to be a bit depressed after another weekend with no points in the GP2 Series,” said Lynn.

“But actually, we could have been talking about the Hungaroring round with a completely different perspective. Let’s face it, things have gone badly for me and the DAMS team in recent rounds, but the main thing for me in Hungary is that we really seem to have turned a corner.”

The seeds of his failure to score points in Hungary were sown in qualifying at the Hungaroring.

The DAMS driver had been second quickest in free practice and clearly had the pace that had been lacking at previous recent races.

But just as he looked set to grab a spot at the front end of the grid, he ran wide at turn 11 on his flying lap and was only able to line up 11th on the grid.

Lodged in the heart of the pack meant it would be difficult to battle for a podium finish and while he tried to make an alternative tyre strategy to the one that front runners were on work, getting caught in mid-pack traffic meant that Lynn could only finish 12th at the chequered flag.

He added: “This is the first time in a while that I can honestly say we could have got a good result if I’d qualified where I should have – it’s a real shame that our race was compromised by the traffic, but we have to take the positives and I’m very happy that we made a lot of progress.

“On the face of it, Hungary was a shocking weekend and that’s been the story of the past few rounds.

“But for the first time in a while we can say we’re moving forwards.”

Lynn will now be hoping to take advantage of that progress as the GP2 Series moves to Hockenheim in Germany this weekend.

Qualifying is tomorrow at 2.55pm (British time), with the feature race on Saturday at 2.20pm and the sprint race at 9.25am on Sunday.