24/08/2007
NEWS STORY
Super Agurirace drivers Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson made an encouraging start to the 2007 Turkish Grand Prix weekend, with both drivers completing their respective planned test programmes. Anthony's afternoon running was brought to a halt at the end of the session following a coming together with the barrier at Turn 3, however both drivers were reasonably happy with the balance of their SA07's at the end of play today.
Takuma Sato: I am very glad to be back racing after the summer break. The team is upbeat and looking forward to the second half of the season, especially after our last race in Budapest where, towards the end, our pace was strong, so we have a very positive attitude here in Istanbul. Of course everybody else has made progress aswell as us, but we need to find more speed. However, I think it was a very good day. We completed the normal tyre comparisons, even though we were interrupted by the Red Flag, and I am reasonably happy with the car balance.
Anthony Davidson: It was a difficult day and we found it hard to find a good car balance in these windy conditions. We struggled at the beginning of the first session, but we made some set-up changes and were making good progress towards the end with a reasonably competitive lap time. In the second session we were facing similar problems as we had experienced in the morning, and then we had the drain cover incident and the track took a while to come back to a good grip level again. After setting a competitive time on the prime tyre, we went out for an option tyre run at the end of the afternoon and unfortunately I made a mistake going into Turn 3, ran wide and touched the barrier. I am comfortable on where we are with first lap performance at the moment, so I am looking forward to Qualifying tomorrow.
Graham Taylor, Sporting Director: Hot and tough. With a dusty circuit at the beginning of the day, we waited for quite a long time before going out on track. We obtained some decent information from this morning's run, but the Red Flag this afternoon compromised a proportion of our information gathering exercises and Anthony's ‘off' towards the end will also rob us of a little data. However, Taku seems to have got on well with the car and I believe that we have gathered enough from today to benefit us tomorrow.
To check out our Turkey practice gallery, click here