Glasgow Warriors have the capacity to turn their season around in the next three weeks, according to the playmaker who helped them put in a much improved performance on their second visit to BT Murrayfield in a week.

There was a second disappointment for the Pro12 champions as, with their Scotstoun home ground unplayable, they were forced to return to the national stadium six days after being well beaten by inter-city rivals.

The back-to-back defeats meant Edinburgh retained the 1872 Challenge Cup for the first time, having secured it for the first time in six seasons a year ago, but with recalled Scotland stand-off Dunc Weir pulling the strings, Glasgow dominated in all aspects other than the final scoreboard.

He consequently believes they showed enough in the first half in particular to suggest that they can go to Racing 92 and claim the victory that can resurrect their European Champions Cup campaign which sees them travel to Northampton the following week before meeting Racing again at Scotstoun.

“We switch competitions now for three weeks and there’s no better opportunity than to go away to Racing, come away with a victory and keep building on that,” said Weir.

“We’re bitterly disappointed with the results over the past two weeks. We need to go to Racing and put on a great performance, which is in the locker from us. We just killed ourselves as a team in that second half.”

Since Racing, who recruited Dan Carter following his imperious performance during the All Backs’ World Cup win, were leading the French Championship when the Scottish derby ended with Glasgow having dropped to eighth in the 12 team Pro12 table, such confidence could seem slightly delusional.

However, Weir - who registered six of his team's points in Saturday's 14-11 defeat - still believes the team that went in as top seeds with Racing and Northampton as well as the Scarlets, who tellingly are leading the Pro12 table but have been whipping boys in that European pool, are close to being competitive with the elite teams.

“It’s the small margins in rugby to make a team click,” he said.

“I thought the forwards in that first half were absolutely outstanding and we left a couple of tries out there. If you go in with a couple more tries you can push forward.

“We didn’t play in the right areas in the second half and that put a wee bit pressure on us and we gave away some really soft penalties and that meant we didn’t really get any momentum in that second half.”

Still only 24, Weir is already one of the longest serving players on the Warriors books and he seemed acutely aware of having let down the club’s fans who had been used to seeing Glasgow dominate in derbies for six years but have now watched them lose the last three.

All the more so because they had been forced to make that double trip along the M8 in the course of this festive season.

“I thought the fans came through and really made it like a home game for Glasgow and it’s just hard to take when you don’t put on a show for them,” he said.

“It’s not ideal by any means (switching to Murrayfield), but I think the spirit of the fans coming through in their large numbers and the season ticket holders was terrific and real credit to them during this festive period and the message from the team would just be: ‘Sorry we didn’t put on a performance and get the victory for them.’

“Credit to them, they were terrific.”