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Difficult qualifying for Team Ireland |
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Saturday, 02 February 2008 |
Eastern Creek, Australia, 2 February 2008: Adam Carroll will start 12th and 16th for Belmayne A1 Team Ireland in round six of the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport in
Australia tomorrow.
After losing valuable track time on Friday due to a crack in the tub, the team worked
late into the night changing the chassis in the hope of turning their fortunes around. In this morning’s free practice Adam began to move up the timesheets but on old tyres wasn’t able to demonstrate the true pace of the car. This meant the first time both Adam and the team were able to work with the car on new tyres was in qualifying, leaving limited time for changes and putting them at a disadvantage to the rest of the grid.
After a good first lap in qualifying one, Adam was P7 in the standings with a 1m 19.328. The team made changes to try and improve the balance and overall grip of the car ahead of qualifying two.
Unfortunately, despite improving his time to a 1m 18.929 and being only 0.78s off pole, Adam will start 12th for tomorrow morning’s Sprint race.
In Feature race qualifying Adam clocked a 1m 20.150s in before putting in a 1m 19.706 in the final seconds on qualifying four leaving him 16th on the grid for the Feature race.
Adam Carroll: “We expected to go a bit better but we really struggled with overall grip and just couldn’t get the performance out the car. When the grip is there you can drive on the limit, but as it was I couldn’t push any harder. The team did a cracking job getting the car ready overnight, we just need to find out why we’re lacking in performance now. We’ll race hard tomorrow though and still try and get some good results.”
Dan Walmsley, Race Engineer: “We started off solidly in qualifying one considering the poor start we had to the weekend and we felt that P7 was a good platform to move forward from. The time didn’t come though and as the session went on we seemed to drop back. It’s really apparent now how badly the issues in Friday’s practice have hurt our qualifying chances. However, we still believe we have a good setup for the races tomorrow and look forward to proving that we’re not beaten yet.”
Mark Gallagher, Team Principal: "The team has been working extremely hard this weekend and so the results in qualifying are disappointing. It’s part and parcel of competing in A1GP that you have good and bad weekends but after a very strong weekend in Taupo it’s hard to come to Australia and start so far back. Adam is good racer though and I’m sure he’ll once again show what a good guy he is in race conditions.”
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