Hamish Brown will take a two-stroke lead into the weekend of the Le Vaudreuil Golf Challenge after carding a three under par 69.
The Dane backed up his opening round 66 to move to nine under at Golf PGA France du Vaudreuil and two ahead of Norwegian Kristian Krogh Johannessen and French duo Julien Sale and Julien Brun.
Brown was happy with his ability to shoot in the 60s, despite not having his best stuff on a challenging day.
“It was hard,” he said. “There was a different wind direction and my iron play was a shambles to say the least. Difficult day but good grinding, happy with the grinding, just need to figure out the iron play.
“The course conditions were what I expected, a little more bouncy, a little harder to get it to the hole, harder to hold the fairways.
“It was a different wind direction, so there were some harder drives. It was difficult and was probably a good protection for the course.”
Brown made five birdies on Friday, with just two blemishes, including a near albatross on the eighth, the ball running narrowly passed the hole and resulting in a two-putt birdie.
The 27-year-old then made a smart up-and-down from just over 100 yards on the ninth, his final hole, after finding trouble off the tee to reach the clubhouse with a two-stroke cushion.
He plans to stick with his conservative approach over the weekend, but hopes to execute his strategy better than today.
“Into the greens I’ve been trying to be conservative, it didn’t really work out today because I didn’t strike it well enough to hit the middle parts. You can really make a lot of mistakes if you start pitching it outside of the green. But I think my plan is good enough to keep doing that, I just need to hit the middle of the ball a little bit more and we’ll be fine.
“It’s the second round, you can’t win it on a Friday but you can put yourself out of it. I just tried to stick to my gameplan, set up as many chances as possible and take it from there. I didn’t set up that many to be honest but happy with the grinding, and looking forward to tomorrow.
“We’re all here to win but there’s two rounds to go and I don’t even know what the standings are. I’ve played decent golf, I’m going to try and keep going, set up as many chances as I can and we’ll see Sunday afternoon how it goes.”
Italy’s Jacopo Vecchi Fossa, France’s Benjamin Kedochim, South Africa’s Wilco Nienaber, Australia’s Austin Bautista, Peru’s Julian Perico, and Germany’s Michael Hirmer share fifth place on six under par.
The third round gets under way on Saturday at 7.35am local time, with Brown teeing off alongside Johannessen at 1.40pm.
