Trident Racing is ready hit the track again, as the long 2007 GP2 season is set start on February 21 and 22, with the first testing session on the French Paul Ricard Circuit. The Italian team returns to the series after a really positive debut year, with innovations on both the drivers and the technical line-up. Trident’s cars will be driven by two talented young rookies, Pastor Maldonado and Kohei Hirate, long contended during this winter’s silly season. The Japanese, who run the F3 Euro Series in 2006, is one of Toyota’s official developmental drivers, while the Venezuelan, former Italian F. Renault 2.0 Champion, joins the GP2 after a successful year in the World Series Renault. The technical staff, headed by Team Principal Alessandro Alunni Bravi, comes from an expansion that was strongly wanted by team’s management. The project of having two engineers of the same level on both cars was completed by hiring three experienced techs with a solid background and noticeable past achievements. Kohei Hirate’s car will be followed by the returning Stefano Alessi, who has a long F3000 and GP2 experience behind, and Luigi Mascheroni, who was part of Magneti Marelli’s GP2 project. Two new Trident hires, Graziano Michelacci and Julien Simon-Chautemps, will serve for the car driven by Pastor Maldonado; Michelacci comes directly from Formula One, where he spent four years with Minardi and one year as Scott Speed’s engineer at Toro Rosso; Simon-Chautemps was involved with Prema in last season’s F3 Euro Series.
Trident Racing Team Owner: Maurizio Salvadori
The GP2 Series is developing more and more connections with Formula One, and Trident Racing will have a developmental Toyota driver in the 2007 line-up: how much is important, for a GP2 team, to have a strong link with the F1 world?
Somebody is telling about technical co-operations between F1 teams and GP2 teams. Maybe that kind of co-operations actually happen, but I think that you can gain a competitive advantage only by having continuity. GP2 teams don’t need only some technical advices, but a well-disposed and well-prepared technical staff.
Trident Racing Team Principal: Alessandro Alunni Bravi
2006 was your first year, and you got three wins. What are your targets for the new season?
Our target is to improve: improve our technical staff, the organization and, as a consequence, our racing results. Everybody in the team has his personal targets, but I see setting a final position or a number of wins as something of conceited. We have many strong opponents, and all teams were reinforced with experienced engineers and quality drivers. It will be the mental disposition, the humbleness and the team spirit to make the difference.
Trident Racing will start this year’s championship with two rookies. How much it’s difficult to work without a specific experience from driver’s side?
Young drivers are always an exciting challenge: I always believed that talent overcomes experience, so I don’t think that having a rookie as a driver is that much a downside if, of course, the rookie is well talented, with a solid technical background and a professional attitude. Though both Hirate and Maldonado shown in the past all those qualities, we expect the first part of the season to be difficult due to the limited testing schedule and the few practice time during the events shared with Formula 1. If our drivers will manage to understand the new tires’ evolution during the one-lap shootout and carry the pressure of the race, I think that we’ll get many satisfactions during 2007. For Trident Racing is more significant to obtain good results by letting two rookies drive than hiring a professional.
