A weekend spoilt by sheer misfortune.

This turned out to be one of those race weekends in which everything that can possibly go wrong went wrong...

Free practice on Friday wasn't too bad, with Ho Pin ending up P7 in the final standings of the day. Like probably everybody else our practice sessions were seriously hampered by red lights and the fact that is was nearly impossible to string a series of laps togehter without incidents occuring on this fast street circuit.

This qualifying series is definitely by far the worst we have endured this far in the series albeit through no fault of the driver or the team.

Segment 1 : another car hit the barrier so Ho Pin had to lift to avoid some debris, Team Ireland encountered the same problem. Result : both teams with unrepresentative times.

Segment 2 : a very good lap on used tires, actually 8th fastest lap time overall after 2 segments but with the bad time of Segment 1 this meant P14 overall at that point.

Segment 3 : red flag on our flying lap, no time set.

Segment 4 : red flag on the out lap. We did get a run afterwards but with the tires having gone through a heath cycle it was impossible to improve on P14 at that point.

A real nightmare scenario for sure!!!

More bad luck on it's way. Ho Pin had gained a place after the first corner which is a hairpin but it soon transpired that he had been hit hard from behind by another car which had caused major damage to the rear wing and extractor. This of course caused a severe loss of rear grip and thus oversteer and so Ho Pin had a hard time trying to hang on and eventually lost a couple of places. We ended up P15.

More of the same for this one... After the turn one chaos we actually came out P6 and things were looking great only for Ho Pin to come on to the radio to say he had been tapped from behind again. Our strategy was to try and stay out a couple of laps longer than most people but unfortunately the right rear tire started to lose pressure as we were doing so. During the pit stop we tried to remove some parts which had come loose in the impact and thus lost some vital seconds as the field was still running closely together. To round it all off a gearbox problem developed during the race eventually forcing retirement (several cars encountered this problem).

However all was not bad as we had quickest lap in the race (set on the new tires after the pit stop) right untill race winner Team Germany went a little quicker at the end of the race.