After some debate it was decided not to have a chicane just before the great Parabolica corner which is the last turn at the quite interesting circuit of 'Hermanos Rodriguez'. Indeed interesting as the circuit starts with a 1.2 km.! straight. The second part of the circuit consists of series of bends which become faster and faster and for which precise and almost careful driving is required in order to 'get it right' from the beginning. The third part consists of a straigt which leads the cars at top speed into the daunting Parabolica. This corner takes the sport back to it's origins when sheer guts played a big part in the success of a driver. Credit must go to the organisers and A1 for deciding to leave out the chicane as advocated by some. By the way, the Champcars didn't go through the Parabolica in this way as they cut through the nearby base-ball stadium, thus dramatically reducing the speed.

The only downside was the reported (by the drivers) bumpiness of the circuit.

Friday Practice

After a good day's work we were reasonably optimistic of a good qualifying performance for Saturday. Realistacally, a top 8 qualifying position seemed to be on the cards.

Saturday Qualifying

Although for this one we didn't have any major set-backs in terms of traffic or red lights, we only managed P11. The field was pretty close together and a couple of tenths in each segment could have made a big difference.

Sunday Races

Race 1 Sprint Race

Drama at the start as Germany, New Zealand and Mexico got tangled up at very high speed. Fortunately the cars didn't start rolling and nobody was hurt in the mayhem this incident caused. Ho Pin did well to avoid the carnage and came through P8. In the following laps we moved up to P6 and were never really threatened by the next car as the lap times were ok compared with the others.

So for this one we were lucky as we were able to move up from P11 to P6.

Race 2 Feature Race

A brilliant start enabled Ho Pin to go from P6 to P3 after the first corner. At the start of the second lap however Pin didn't use his power boost and so Italy got by and demoted us to P4. Pin had no problem keeping that position untill the pit-stops. We'd decided to stay out a little longer which in hindsight was perhaps not the best possible strategy. When we did come in a problem with an air bottle regulator resulted into a bad pit stop (we lost 4 to 5 seconds) which dramatically influenced the result for the whole team as we fell just behind in stead of in front a bunch of cars which was running very closely together at that time. In the end we finished a a somewhat disappointing P10.