A1 GRAND PRIX - 26.11.2006
Great start to the weekend, disappointing results

Free practice
CengFu ‘Frankie’ Cheng took to the F1-status circuit like a duck to water.
After some reconnaisance laps in the ‘rookie test’ he put in a great lap right at the start of the first official practice which put him P2 at the end of the day.  This was proof to the fact that both driver and car were in great shape for this circuit.  Only new rising star Nico Hulkenberg of Germany went faster.

Qualifying
As it had done the previous days it started raining just after 2 o’clock.  Luckily on Saturday the rain extended only to a few drops which were just enough to cool the track off a little.  Unfortunately Frankie remained a little bit too much on the safe side for this first segment in which some really quick times were set and this resulted in a somewhat disappointing P10. 
Conditions still proved to be ok for another fast lap at the start of the second segment and with a much quicker lap (1 sec.) Frankie moved up to P5.  The times set later on in the session by some of the teams were clearly slower than their times of the first segment so the strategy to be out right at the start of segment 2 proved to be the correct one.

As it was getting hotter again lap times in segments 3 and 4 could not be improved and so we kept P5 overall.
After the P5 in qualifying in Brno this was another great and somewhat unexpected by most performance by Frankie.  And dare we say it, the car can’t have been that bad either…

Race 1 Sprint race
Frankie got a bit overwhelmed in the first corner and lost 3 places so we were P8 after lap 1.  We lost 2 more places in the following laps as Frankie was twice overtaken by other cars using their boost on the straights and thus we ended up in P10 as Frankie didn’t have enough speed for a counter attack.

Race 2 Feature race
On Sunday the afternoon rain duly came around 2 o’clock only this time it was a proper tropical down poor.  The rain continued and it was wisely decided by race control to postpone the start and start behind the safety car.
When the race finally did start it immediately became obvious that Frankie was struggling with the handling of the car as he was seriously off the pace and losing places.  After the mandatory pits stop when we changed onto a different set of wets as the circuit was still to wet at about mid-race and the laps times improved dramatically compared to the others.  We were actually running in the top 5 times.  This was of course too little to late but it confirms our suspicion that the quality of the first set of wets was absolutely terrible.  Frankie confirmed that after the tyre change the handling of the car improved dramatically. 
It has to be said that some of the other teams experienced the same phenomenon.

So after a great start to the weekend the result on Sunday was disappointing.  Frankie will have to develop his racing skills further to be a complete racing driver.  But also the situation with the tires will hopefully not re-occur.