The Grid.co.uk the national & club motor racing website - est1998
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The Grid.co.uk the national & club motor racing website - est1998 |
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Continued from News: mail your news to editorthegrid@yahoo.co.uk World Series by Renault Wickens quickest over 3 days As the final dress rehearsal before the season gets underway for real, there was plenty of valuable information to be gleaned from these collective testing sessions in Barcelona. Robert Wickens (Carlin Motorsport) set the fastest time overall for the three days of testing, which should give him source of motivation for the first race of the season in Monza in a few weeks time. The weather on Thursday morning was just perfect. Right from the word go, the drivers went straight into action. Some even opted to switch to a fresh set of tyres without any further delay. The in-form Robert Wickens (Carlin Motorsport) was the man to clock fastest. The Canadian driver put in a number of quick laps in succession. Then with a lap in 1'32''971, Wickens improved on the time to beat set on Tuesday by Marco Bonanomi (Red Devil Comtec). Wickens did not participate in the remainder of the day's testing, as for him it was off to Shanghai, to take part in the penultimate round of A1 GP. So at the end of the opening hour of the day's action, Robert Wickens was fastest ahead of his teammate Mikhail Aleshin. These two were followed by Giedo Van der Garde (P1 Motorsport), Marco Barba (International Draco) and Miguel Molina (Prema Powerteam). Bertrand Baguette (International Draco) took advantage of a moment with a bit less traffic out on track to move up into second position, with Charles Pic (Tech 1 Racing) doing likewise to improve to third. The teams then made the most of what was left of the morning session to fine-tune their setups, as Bertrand Baguette explains: «The conditions were ideal this morning, so we just had to switch to a fresh set of tyres. I made a slight error on my fastest lap but the results are promising. We have been up in the leading group since the start of the testing and that can only be a good sign. Now, we are going to switch the car to its Monza setup. The season gets underway with one of the big ones!'' Everyone kept on quietly forging ahead with their development programmes in the afternoon. Some teams, such as Prema Powerteam, even practised some pit-stops. Certain drivers still had some new tyres at their disposal, which they had been holding back for the closing minutes of collective testing, even though the track temperature was pretty much like the weather here in Barcelona: it just kept on getting hotter and hotter. In the meantime, the two Interwetten.com cars were heading up proceedings, with Pablo Sanchez ahead of Salvador Duran. As expected, the drivers started to move onto fresh rubber as the day drew to a close. Lap after lap, Julien Jousse (Tech 1 Racing), Fabio Carbone and Marcos Martinez (Pons Racing) took it in turns to improve on each other's times, without any of them being able to better the time set by Wickens in the morning. This meant that it was Robert Wickens who produced the best performance over the course of the three days, ahead of Bertrand Baguette and Charles Pic, the best Rookie. «We have put in some good work over these three days» explains the young Frenchman. «We have gained a lot of experience by clocking up a fair amount of kilometres. Now we're really looking forward to the first race of the season to try and transform what we've learnt in testing into results. I'm not familiar with the track at Monza, so I'll have to learn fast. I can't wait.» Everyone's mind will now be focussed on Monza for the launch of the 2008 season on the weekend of April 26-27.
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