A1 GRAND PRIX - 24.02.2008
Team China: Round 7 - Durban (South-Africa)

FASTEST LAP IN FEATURE RACE

Free practice + Qualifying

A trend is beginning to emerge in free practice in the last 4 races : as Frankie is not a rookie anymore this season we cannot participate in the rookie session on Friday morning. On top if this he didn't know any of the circuits so this means we've been going into the normal free practice on Friday afternoon with a bit of a handicap.

By Saturday monrning free practice we have had time to dial in both car and driver resulting in very good lap times indeed. Again here in Durban, we ended up P6 in free practice.

Qualifying didn't go quite as planned with some red flag situations at the wrong time. The end result was P10 for the Sprint Race and P11 for the Feature Race.

Sprint Race

GREAT RESULT

As is always the case with street race a lot of incidents. This time things turned out to our advantage with a great P4 as a result. Super job by Frankie for keeping his head cool amidst the turmoil.

Feature Race

FASTEST LAP

After a reasonably calm first half of the race Frankie was able to get by Italy and Brazil and thus moved up to P8. Then, just after the second mandatory pit-stop we were able once again to demonstrate that we have a very quick car indeed. As Frankie was easing away from South Africa he put in fastest lap of the race and was constantly lapping at the same pace at the leaders.
Things got chaotic in the final stages of the race. First Canada (P2) made a mistake by clipping the the wall at the inside of the circuit at Turn 1 and found himself in the middle of the circuit. Unfortunately UK (P4) couldn't avoid the car and both were eliminated on the spot. The red flag came out and we were thus running P6. When the field was released from behind the safety car South Africa running in P7 made an over-optimistic move down the inside for Turn 1 and slammed into The Netherlands who were in P4...! In the ensuing chaos Frankie was nearly taken out but somehow luckily survived and came out P4. Alas, the race was finished under the red flag and so positions as they were one lap beforehand means that China is classified P6.
All in all not a bad result after starting P11 and once again we were able to demonstrate that there is an awful lot of speed in the car and driver.