A lot has happened to Elliot Saltman over the past year.

He won a European Tour card last December and officially lost it again last weekend. In between, he was engulfed in a cheating controversy that led to a three-month ban.

Now, the burly Scot finds himself back to square one. Or stage two to be more precise. Along with 17 of his countrymen, Saltman will compete in the second phase of the European Tour's qualifying school, which gets under way tomorrow, across four venues in Spain.

Having made just four cuts in 17 events during a testing rookie season on the main circuit, the 29-year-old's lowly finish of 201st on the Race to Dubai rankings means he doesn't even get to parachute into the six-round final later this month. Saltman will have to regain his ticket to tour the hard way.

"I can't believe how fast the season has gone but I'm now back to where I was this time last year," said Saltman, who will compete at the Las Colinas club in Alicante this weekend. "After I got my card, I thought it was a sprint. You feel you need to get money quickly which is maybe the wrong attitude. You have a whole year. As long as you get the money on the board in that 12-month period, that's all that matters, instead of getting all panicked in the first few events."

Along with his younger brother Lloyd, the Saltman duo became the first siblings in the 34-year history of the qualifying school to come through the same final and earn a tour card, at the 2010 shoot-out in Girona. For Elliot, however, that joy was swiftly tempered as the bubbling saga of an illegal ball-marking incident during a Challenge Tour event earlier in the campaign finally boiled over. He played the first three tournaments of the 2011 season in South Africa before he was summoned to Abu Dhabi for a disciplinary hearing in mid-January and given a 12-week ban for a "serious breach" of regulations.

"This time last year, things were obviously building so things are a bit clearer in my mind this time," added Saltman, ahead of the stage two contest. "It was at the final stage where I was told that I had to go to Abu Dhabi. After the ban, it was more of a mental thing for me to deal with. How would I be perceived by everybody else? But a lot of players welcomed me back. Monty came up and spoke to me, Darren Clarke and some of the other top boys came to me too and wished me all the best. They told me to 'go out and do your job'. That helped me settle."

Life didn't get that much easier on the playing front, though. A run of missed cuts was punctuated by a season-best 12th place finish in the Wales Open, during which Saltman aced Celtic Manor's 17th hole twice. By the time he notched a third hole-in-one of the season at the Madrid Masters – an achievement rewarded with his own body weight in cured ham – the Archerfield golfer was already resigned to returning to qualifying school. It's a prospect that remains easier to swallow than all of that meat.

"It's beautiful stuff but when you've had a packet and you're staring at another few packets , you can get a bit sick of it," he said. "I'm actually trying to sell it to some restaurants. Stage two is where I started last year and I got all the way through. I just have to try and do that all over again."

Along with Saltman, the Scottish posse, which is spread over courses at La Manga, El Valle and Costa Ballena, also features former European Tour players, Alan McLean, Callum Macaulay and Andrew McArthur as well as the Fraserburgh rookie Kris Nicol, who won the third-tier Alps Tour's qualifying school recently.