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Top 10 for Ireland in Taupo |
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Saturday, 19 January 2008 |
Taupo, New Zealand, 18th January 2008: Adam Carroll will start tomorrow morning’s Sprint race from 7th position for Belmayne A1 Team Ireland in round five of the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport in New Zealand.
With the temperature much colder than Friday’s practice and wind blowing dust across the circuit, conditions were tricky out on track. With 22 nations competing on the 3.5km circuit, traffic was also an issue which meant putting the perfect lap together was even harder than usual across the four qualifying segments. In Sprint race qualifying Adam crossed the line in P2 with a 1m16.182s but as others got a cleaner lap he dropped to 7th by the chequered flag with New Zealand’s Jonny
Reid putting Black Beauty on pole in front of his home crowd.
In qualifying for the Feature race, traffic caused problems once again with Adam unable to get a clear lap after some quick changes ahead of Qualifying 4. He finished 13th after two frustrating runs leaving some work to do in tomorrow’s race, but the team is confident that the pace is in the car and Adam is up to the challenge to drive the Celtic Tiger back to the front.
Adam Carroll: “All the work we did yesterday was good and we felt extremely happy. The car was really drivable but yesterday was twice as hot as today and it now feels like we’re in a different country; the conditions have totally changed. What we ended up with yesterday just hasn’t worked for us today, but we made a couple of changes in Qualifying 4 which worked and I then put in my best lap. We have a good race car for tomorrow and hopefully we can make up a few places. It’s a 70-minute Feature race and we saw in China that people make mistakes and a lot can happen, so if we can stay out of trouble I hope to bring the car home in a good position.”
Dan Walmsley, Race Engineer: “It’s disappointing as we really felt that we would be competitive today. On our last run we got a little bit of traffic in Sector 1 which cost us our ultimate lap time but we still have some things to try for tomorrow and the team are extremely focused. We struggled for overall grip and didn’t extract the performance out the car that we did yesterday. The track conditions have changed a lot and we made adjustments accordingly but there’s still some work to be done. We made a few changes during the qualifying sessions and the team worked well to get them done in a short period of time. We’re optimistic we will perform better tomorrow as we’ve already shown that we have a quick car, we now need to convert that into a result.”
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