Monday, October 9, 2006
The New Zealand A1GP team, with racer Jonny Reid, placed seventh in A1GP feature race and picked up four championship points in the second round at Brno track, Czech Republic.
New Zealand managed to secure themselves first place in the qualifying race by being fastest in all four qualifying segments with a time of 3:30.053, Germany second with 3:30.524. This put New Zealand in the pole position to start the sprint race.
When racing for the 20 minute sprint race started Germany and New Zealand ‘locked horns’ before the very first corner. It ended with both cars crashing out of the race.
This crash made both New Zealand and Germany start from the end of the track for the feature race.
New Zealand managed to crawl their way back to get seventh place, but dropped to fourteenth place from twelfth, out of 23 competing nations, on the leader board with only five points.
David Sears, Engineering Team Director for both Germany and New Zealand, said: “Reid and his German counterpart Nico Hülkenberg were warned about keeping apart…but still ended up making life difficult for themselves.”
Sears added: “To finish first you must first finish and the track is incredibly wide here at Brno, so why New Zealand and Germany should be rubbing wheels on the very first corner is anyone’s guess. To recover and finish strongly was encouraging for Jonny and the car certainly has the raw speed and looks to be one of the quickest going around. That’s the pleasing part amid the disappointment and we now need to refocus and prepare for the next month’s round in China.”
“We were so much quicker than the other teams in qualifying that it would be criminal to be banging wheels when a great result is there for the taking.”
The next A1GP race takes place on November 12 in Beijing.