16/07/2008
NEWS STORY
This weekend, at Hockenheim, the GP2 Series starts the second and decisive half of the season, and it does so with the Racing Engineering driver, Giorgio Pantano, leading the Championship currently 11 points ahead of his closest competitor, and with the Spanish team just 5 points away from the top position in the team standings.
The first half of Racing Engineering's 2008 season in the F1 feeder series has been excellent, with three wins and the impressive reliability record of not having a single mechanical failure to either of the two Repsol and Telefónica backed cars during the ten races held so far. All this has been achieved thanks to the great team work that began in the preseason with the very good results in the winter tests and this has continued into the first half of the year, culminating in Giorgio Pantano's stunning Silverstone weekend, where he scored a dominant win in the Feature Race and a no less impressive podium finish in the wet Sprint Race.
In addition to the expert Italian, the young Spaniard Javier Villa completes the Spanish team's line-up and although he hasn't been lucky so far this year, as regards results, his laptimes always place him among the fastest. Because of this it's expected that he will also become a regular in the top places in the second half of the season as Giorgio, the main favourite for the 2008 title, already is.
For both drivers the next date with the GP2 series schedule, the sixth of the year, starts this Friday morning with the free practice at the Hockenheim track, the venue of the F1 German Grand Prix. This is a track that has changed dramatically in the last few years after being fully rebuilt to adapt it to modern F1 safety standards. Hockenheim went from a track where the main feature was the high top speed on the long straights that went trough the forest whereas now it is a more technical circuit, with hard braking areas and slow and medium speed corners, such as those in the always crowded Motodrome where most of the fans stand each year to see the races at the German track.