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It was a day of conflicting emotions in the Racing Engineering garage today: despite strong performances by both Adam Carroll and Javier Villa in free practice and qualifying the team was nonetheless a little downbeat due to events that were out of their control.
Adam put in his usual strong performance in both free practice and qualifying, where he finished seventh and sixth respectively, but his mind was understandably elsewhere as the funeral of his cousin, the former World Youth Equestrian Champion Sherelle Duke, was being held today in their home town of Portadown.
Javi also put in a forceful drive in free practice to finish eleventh, but with a ten place penalty to be handed down as a result of a steward's decision in Budapest any qualifying result would be lost. Accordingly he and his engineers chose to use the session to help set up the car for the race and gain useful information on the handling of the car. He finished nineteenth in the session.
A slightly subdued Alfonso de Orleans Borbon noted after the session: "All in all it was not too bad. I possibly expected a little bit more from Javi but we didn't want to push too much; because of the ten place penalty we preferred to just set up for the race. It's a difficult weekend for Adam, so he's actually done very well considering his situation. Overall I'm quite happy, and the boys have done good work; there were no problems with either of the cars, and I'm quite confident for tomorrow's race. I think once Adam has his helmet on he'll be pushing quite hard, and we should be seeing some fairly decent results tomorrow."
Adam Carroll later added: "I just tried to focus on the job today, and it wasn't too bad: sixth is a good place to start the race tomorrow. We missed some of practice, and that would have helped with the car I think, because it's a weird circuit to drive, very challenging, with so many quick corners, like the big left one [turn eight] where you're basically flat until the end. Sixth is good, we can have a good race from there, and I'm going to try my hardest, as usual, to get a good result. I think it's going to be a good race."
In a break from a debrief with his engineers, Javier Villa stated: "The qualifying session was good; nineteenth, but I wasn't really pushing the tyres because we want to keep some new ones for the race. The car is a little better here, and in free practice we could go really fast, and now in qualifying we had a car that was set up more for the race. But I'm quite happy because tomorrow we can do twenty laps, really constant, no problem."
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 06 January 2007 )
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