Brands Hatch-A1 Team Netherlands was not on form today during the final qualifying sessions of this A1GP season. In a heavily fought qualifying for the Sprint race, where the intervals were extremely small Jeroen Bleekemolen had to settle for an 11th fastest time with a lap of 1’15.338. In the Feature race qualifying A1 Team Netherlands finished in tenth place.
In free practice this morning A1 Team Netherlands was not amongst the front runners. In this final session Bleekemolen set a fourteenth fastest time.
After a short delay the Sprint race qualifying started. Almost everyone waited until the dying minutes of the session before going out on track for the flying lap. Bleekemolen did set a third fastest time at first, but soon A1 Team Netherlands dropped to seventh. In the second session A1 Team Netherlands seemed on its way to improve their lap time further but in the end Bleekemolen lost too much. This caused A1 Team Netherlands to drop further to 11th. In the fight for the Championship New Zealand did not do well compared to Switzerland. Switzerland, which only needs one seventh place finish for the title is starting in third, New Zealand in tenth. Great Britain took the pole on their home circuit, with only two thousands of a second.
In the first run for the Feature race qualifying A1 Team Netherlands again seemed to improve on the fastest time up to then. On used tyres Bleekemolen set a time of 1’15.704,which was good for a provisional ninth time. The final qualifying run only brought a marginal improvement, with a time of 1’15.620. This caused A1 Team Netherlands to drop one more place, to tenth on the grid. India took the final pole of the season, followed by Great Britain and Switzerland that is getting very close to the title with New Zealand down in seventeenth.
Of course Jeroen Bleekemolen was dissapointed about the result; “We wanted to be up front of course. It is a shame, we just came up short every outing. We did not manage to get the balance of the car completely right. It was under – and oversteer, every time a little bit of one or the other. No matter what we did, we did not make progress in our times. Because everyone is close together you might say that overtaking will be difficult tomorrow, with the difference in pace being this small. But on the other hand that, especially because these are the final races of the season, people will go the extra mile and will give it all. I think that we might well see cars coming by on less than four wheels.”
Jan Lammers was very clear in his analysis and he thinks a good dose of self reflection is necessary; “I normally can accept loosing, but this aggrevates me. Regardless how the races will go tomorrow, we can be lucky and maybe gain something with good pitstops, everyone of us has to take this result very personal. Without some measures we cannot compete up front, that much is clear. Getting the car balance right is a skill that we should already own and if we want to start saying that we are able to win races there is quite a bit we will have to do first.”
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