Brazil
A1 Team Brasil will begin tomorrow's sprint race from the third row of the grid after Raphael Matos qualified in sixth position on his first outing for the squad. However, the day has been a little unconventional, with the grid formed from the results of this morning's practice session, after much of today's running had to be cancelled due to safety concerns relating to the manhole covers on the racing line of the circuit, which will be repaired and secured prior to tomorrow's races.
Following yesterday's issues with the circuit layout, organisers worked through the night to resolve the turn eight hairpin, which proved too tight for the cars to negotiate. To solve the problem, the track was altered, shortening the main straight and moving the hairpin bend to a wider turning circle.
With the layout issues resolved, the cars began a 90-minute practice session at lunchtime today in preparation for the planned qualifying session this afternoon. However, after 25 minutes the session had to be red-flagged after a manhole cover came loose on the racing line between turns three and four, and the practice was subsequently suspended to allow the necessary repairs to take place.
The decision was taken by A1 officials to form the sprint race grid from the practice results at the time of the red-flag. The second race will begin at 3pm local time, and an announcement by A1GP will be made later today if arrangements can be made to move the sprint race to a later start time, to allow an extra practice to take place in the morning.
Emerson Fittipaldi, Team Principal: "I am very happy with the way that the team ran the car today and Raphael did a fantastic job, improving all the time. He was running right at the top of the times, and was on a very fast lap towards the end of the session, but was unfortunately slowed down when he got stuck in traffic in the last sector. With the performance of the car and driver, we really should have been second or third fastest, so that puts us in a confident frame of mind. Regarding the problems with the track, we cannot be too critical. I have experienced this kind of problem many times on American street tracks, even when I was racing I had this sort of thing happen at least twice. The Chinese people did a great job to put together the track, but unfortunately we've had this problem with the manhole cover. They have a lot of time to sort this out before running tomorrow, so now we just look forward to the race."
Raphael Matos: "I'm quite happy with the car and the team is working well - we have secured a good grid spot for tomorrow despite the limited running we had. I was still learning about the car and the circuit when the session was stopped, but this is the situation and we just have to get on with things. We had a really good lap going until the second to last corner when I was held up by a car, which was a shame. I'm a bit disappointed with the way that things have happened with the problems on the track, but there's nothing we can do. It's quite a fun track to drive, it's very bumpy but every street circuit is like that. I have just been trying to use my experience of this kind of track from Atlantics this year and hopefully everything will be sorted and we'll have a good race tomorrow."
France
Saturday morning practice was red flagged and qualifying cancelled after officials discovered a problem with manhole covers on the street circuit. As a result the fastest laps set up to that point in practice were taken to form the starting grid for tomorrow's sprint race.
Unfortunately A1 Team Frances Nicolas Lapierre had only completed six installation laps and had not been working on setting a fast time at that point as the team were working on testing the braking system as the incident occurred on the track. He will start tomorrow's sprint race from a 21st position.
Nicolas Lapierre said: "I ran about six laps and immediately noticed that the car was not performing as strongly as I wanted. But before we could put in any fast laps the session was red-flagged because of a manhole cover sticking out after turn 3. It is a real shame because we could definitely have been at the sharp end of the grid if there wasn't a problem on the circuit which caused qualifying to be cancelled. Tomorrows sprint race will be tough but I'm hopeful we can make our way through the field."
Germany
sign in