A1 Team Brazil was in action today as driver Felipe Guimarães began practice in preparation for this weekend’s races at the Chengdu International Circuit in China, for round two of the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport.
Despite threats of rain, the day dawned warm and sunny and the practice sessions were held in near perfect conditions. Felipe took to the bumpy track for this morning’s first 30-minute rookie practice session with the aim of learning the circuit and beginning the task of finding a suitable set-up. Felipe ran consistently strong throughout the session, and was third fastest for the majority of the half hour, behind only the experienced Danny Watts and Narain Karthikeyan for GBR and India respectively. As the track got quicker as it warmed up, Felipe was pushed down to fourth on the last lap of the session when Switzerland’s Alexandre Imperatori slipped into third position.
In the second of the rookie sessions, Felipe headed out early on to continue learning the track and the feel of the car in the conditions. He maintained a strong pace and was in second position for the first half of the practice behind Imperatori. He slipped to fifth as the lap times fell but moved up to third four minutes before the end behind France’s Nicolas Prost and Karthikeyan. With just a minute to go, Imperatori once again leap-frogged the Brazilian, putting him down to fourth.
In the afternoon’s one-hour practice, in which all the nominated race drivers took to the track, Felipe went out a quarter of the way into the session. His first flying lap of 1:17.234 placed him fourth fastest but in a frantic and interrupted latter part of the session Felipe slipped down to ninth as the lap times fell. Five minutes before the end, trying to find the limits of the car, Felipe had a spin, which unfortunately beached him on the gravel, ending the session. Tomorrow will see all teams have one final hour of practice before the afternoon’s qualifying shoot-out.
Felipe Guimarães: “The rookie session this morning was very good and we did some good times and made some positive changes to the car. In the afternoon I ran new tyres but on my fast lap someone spun in front of me so I could not improve on my time, otherwise it would have been better. The track is very bumpy and there are a lot of corners so we just have to keep working hard on the set-up and make the most of our last practice tomorrow before qualifying.”
Dan Walmsley, Race Engineer: “Straight out of the box this morning the car seemed competitive and we knew that there was still some time to come from Felipe without making an major set-up changes. This afternoon we ran new tyres but didn’t get the lap time out of the car and we also suffered from oversteer. We’ll be working to solve the oversteer problem tonight. Felipe gave us some very good feedback and we have good information to work on to get it right for tomorrow morning.”
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