Resetting a timed Drag and Drop Freeform

hi there I have created a drag and drop freeform question where a series of boxes have to be dragged onto a correct or incorrect area. The question is set to allow multiple attempts as I have also created a custom timer on the base layer (from another post in the forums) that counts down from 30 seconds - the idea is that the learner has a fixed time to try and retry until getting the question correct.

My question is to do with resetting the drag and drop shapes to original positions - I can easily set the trigger on the retry button to reset the base layer to initial state but by doing this it also resets my timer since this is triggered on the start of the timeline of the base layer.

Can someone help - is there a way to reset the shapes to their original positions on a Retry, but not resetting the timer?

thanks