A1GP
The eighth round of the A1 GP World Cup of Motorsport began to day, in hotand humid conditions on the sun soaked streets of Durban, South Africa. Narain Karthikeyan continued to push India to the forefront of internationalmotorsport, setting the second fastest time in morning practice.
Having arrived in Durban direct from testing with the Williams F1 team inValencia, Karthikeyan was on the pace straight away, with only current A1GP champions France able to beat his fastest time.
A1 Team India was intending to use the second session to make a number ofset up changes, in an effort to top the time sheets. However, the team were unable to capitalise from these changes after the final practice session was curtailed to just 30 minutes of the allotted one hour, due to track surface problems.
Commenting on his day at the Durban circuit, Karthikeyan commented, “Thetrack seems good, I think we went a bit far with some of the set up changes this afternoon, so we need to come back a bit on that. But I’m confident fortomorrow; we know what we need to do to go faster. We always aim to be inthe top six, if not higher, so that’s what I’m expecting tomorrow. â€
Speaking about the local support from the Indian community, Karthikeyanadded, “Durban has a huge Indian community and I suppose this is as near as we’ll get at the moment to a home race! I hope there will be lots of Indian flags in the grandstand this weekend. â€
A1 Team India Seatholder, Yohann Setna said, “In the morning Narain was P2, which is pretty good start. In the afternoon we made a couple of changes to thecar, but we seemed to go backwards a bit. We changed the car back to a set-up similar to the morning, but then the session ended half an hour early, so wedidn’t get the chance to improve.
“The track is very bumpy, which is proving to be the main problem at themoment and Narain is sometimes struggling to put the power down. As I said, we changed the set-up to allow for that, but then the car began to suffer from abit of understeer in the entry to the corners and while Narain was trying tocompensate, the back end of the car became unstable. We were just workingon that, and making the car more stable when the session was red flagged. Narain has shown he definitely has the pace, so I’m looking forward to seeinghow we do tomorrow. â€
