An eventful day

• 07/04/2011

  A day with...

• 06/04/2011

  PUMPING IRON IN...

• 04/04/2011

  Time to smile with...

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James, quite an eventful day – can you summarise what we learnt today over the two sessions?
JA: Well, we didn't manage to learn too much about the handling or the setting up of the car because we spent a lot of time in the garage after two very unexpected and unwelcome upright failures. Both of them in the same circumstances, both of them under braking, and both pretty much identical in terms of what bits broke.

It was very surprising to see something like that happen because we knew that there weren't any particularly high loads going into the car here at the track, and we knew that we'd run many thousands of kilometres on this design pre-season and at the first race without any drama. So, we had to have a bit of a think about what had happened, and it was very quickly apparent that the uprights that had failed were from a separate manufacturing batch to any of the others we had run this year. The finger of suspicion quite quickly pointed at, the material, but out of an abundance of caution we wanted to check through a number of other things as well. In the end we were forced to conclude that the material from this second batch of uprights was substandard and we duly ran the second half of the afternoon session on uprights from a different batch without drama.

What did you learn about the tyres today, particularly the soft tyres?
JA: Like in Melbourne we see a very substantial performance difference between the hard and the soft tyres – well over a second, more like two. We also see that the degradation for the tyres here is much more like it was pre-season – quite high – much more so than Melbourne. However, with only very limited opportunity to set up the car, and not having achieved a particularly ideal balance, our degradation was less good than we are used to. The better the car is balanced, the more sweetly it will run on its tyres.

When we spoke in Melbourne, you mentioned there would be some upgrade packages to the car coming into this race. Can you tell us some more about that?
JA: Well, they were all running today, largely without drama although both our front wings took a bit of battle damage as we suffered this morning's woes. However, they were back up and running in time for the next session. Overall though, we've got the new additions on the cars and they seem to be delivering what we'd hoped.

Going into tomorrow, you'll be hoping for an improvement. What are your expectations going into P3 and then Qualifying?
JA: I hope we can take a step forward from Melbourne's qualifying and have both of our cars in the top ten, and both our cars competing for a good number of points come the race.

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