08/09/2006
NEWS STORY
The Honda Racing F1 Team were back on track in Monza today as free practice got underway for Sunday's Italian Grand Prix - the final race of the European season. After a generally positive test at the circuit one week ago, where the team continued its run of competitive form, today's race weekend preparations were unfortunately curtailed by engine problems with the T-car driven by third driver Anthony Davidson.
As usual, the intention was for the race drivers to complete a limited number of laps in this morning's session, leaving Anthony to conduct the initial set-up and tyre selection work. Unfortunately Anthony suffered an engine failure on his first timed lap and the car was confined to the garage for an engine change.
This afternoon, whilst Anthony was doing a competitive long run, the team experienced a further engine failure to the T-car after eight timed laps. Already armed with substantial set-up and tyre data from last week's test, the team opted to cease running whilst it investigated the cause of the problems.
Anthony Davidson: "Whilst today's problems are obviously disappointing, the positives are that we know the car is competitive here and we have plenty of data from three days' testing here last week. Had this been any other race track we would be really struggling data-wise going into tomorrow but at least we have a good baseline and the car was feeling good. We will have to wait for the outcome of the investigations to talk about how we might fare for the rest of the weekend."
Gil de Ferran, Sporting Director: "Obviousy we had a difficult day with, unusually, two failures occurring very early on in the life of each engine in Anthony's car. Since they were totally unexpected, we elected not to run the race cars until we could gain a better understanding of what was causing them. Needless to say this has not been the best start to the weekend for us as we collected very little data today about cars and tyres, however thankfully we were testing here a week ago so the set-up of the car and tyre choice are more dialled-in than they would otherwise be. We look forward to a better day tomorrow."
To check out our Italy practice gallery, click here