26/08/2005
NEWS STORY
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A1 Team Great Britain made more progress with its car this week in France. An official A1 Grand Prix test was held over three days with 20 teams taking part. This is the second time that the cars have taken to the track and was an invaluable opportunity to get to grips with set-up before the inaugural race at Brands Hatch next month.
Following the first ever running of the car at Silverstone three weeks ago, A1Team.GBR continued with a test programme focusing on learning the key car and driver parameters that will contribute to success in the races. Alex Lloyd made his debut in the car and Robbie Kerr drove the car in a spectacular rolling race-start rehearsal were the most visibly notable events of the test.
Between them the drivers put in 224 laps of the 4.157km circuit, bringing their total testing distance over the three days to approaching 1000km. Robbie took the wheel for day one to assess the changes since he drove at Silverstone. Alex and Robbie both drove on day two. Feedback then went into further adjustments for Alex to run the four hours testing today.
Robbie Kerr: The testing's gone well and we found some time on old rubber. We've got an idea of where to go with the car. I'm happy with that. The rolling start was good - really interesting. Obviously it was for show but it was quite interesting to see how people behaved. It felt like we were in race mode.
Alex Lloyd: It's been good for me to get in the car and get a feel for what the A1GP car's like. Today went a bit better than yesterday in terms of time but with the harder tyres it was frustrating not to be able to put faster times in. We did a long run to practice the maximum race distance – about 25 minutes which is how long the brakes and tyres will need to last in a race and that went very well. It was encouraging that we managed to stay at the same pace through the whole run. From that respect it's been productive and we've gone through all the things on set-up and found what we need to look at.
John Surtees, Team Principal: Technically it's been a continuation of putting the team together and also fully evaluating the car. We haven't gone out to do a pure out and out speed type arrangement because Paul Ricard is a circuit where it's very good to evaluate and understand the car but it often doesn't relate to other circuits. And so the big thing has been getting people to gel. Robbie did part of the testing and in fact it's very unfortunate that on two set of new tyres which of course were for performance once he got a red flag come out and then once got stopped by someone getting into trouble. Certainly the data showed we were right on the pace so that's encouraging. Today with Alex it's largely been taking on working with harder tyres and also high fuel loads. Now we have to evaluate exactly what has happened and make certain that the best ingredients come right for the race.
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