A1 GRAND PRIX - 09.10.2006
Round 2 Brno, Czech Republic

Free practice and Qualifying P5
The beautiful and challenging Brno-circuit was new to nearly all drivers. Biggest exception of course being Team Czech Republic driver and local hero Thomas Enge.

In both free practice sessions Frankie was constantly ‘on the pace’ confirming his ability as a driver. It was also nice to see that our base set-up had to be pretty good right from the start. In the first of the four qualifying runs a small technical problem resulted in a very disappointing P14. The problem was quickly picked up on however by the engineers; so no need to worry as we still had 2 new sets of tires left. In the second qualifying run Frankie actually went quicker on used tires and already improved his position to P8 after 2 segments. In the third and fourth segments on new tires it all came together nicely with some top times and a brilliant P5 in general. No need to say the whole team was over the moon and we were pretty proud of ourselves as not many people (including ourselves...) would have believed this possible in only the second round of the series. After qualifying Team Great Britain was set back to P10 because of a technical infringement and so we were P4 for the grid of Race One.

RACE 1 Sprint race
Well, we were extremely lucky as Frankie made a very good rolling start and was right up with the leading cars of Germany and New Zealand when those two touched and spun off as they were approaching the very fast turn one. Frankie was actually hit by the German car. Not surprisingly accounts from what really happened were different from driver to driver but an investigation by the stewards of the meeting resulted in no action being taken and so it was classed as a racing incident. Because of the incident we gained 2 places but also lost 2 so at the end of the first lap we were P4 behind Malaysia, Canada and France and in front of Czech and USA.This is also the finishing order of Race One as nothing much happened.

We got promoted to P3 ahead of France thanks to the new rules.

RACE 2 Feature race
Unfortunately Frankie let the car ‘bog down’ a little so he dropped back to P6 by the end of lap one. We toghether with several other teams had opted to come in for the mandatory pit stop as soon as possible, after 8 laps. A good pit stop by the crew meant we kept our position on the track.

Initially everything was fine with the new tires but then slowly but surely we started to loose some pace and eventually lost 3 places as the car was developing a lot of understeer and also some vibrations in the steering wheel. We fell back to P8 with Frankie being able to hold off Team Netherlands for many laps untill the end. Strangely enough, in the last 2 laps we were on the pace again lapping as quick as the train of cars fighting for P2.

All in all it was a fantastic weekend for Frankie, Team China and Team Astromega and hopefully a token of good times to come at the next round which is our home race at Beijing, China.