The Hindu : Sport / Racing : Motor : Trulli ready for an encore

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Saturday, May 21, 2005

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Sport - Racing : Motor

Trulli ready for an encore

MONTE CARLO: Jarno Trulli doesn't need a long time to read his list of wins in Formula One.

He only has one.

At last year's Monaco GP, Trulli ended eventual champion Michael Schumacher's winning streak.

Now there's another driver dominating the championship, good friend Fernando Alonso. But at least Trulli knows he can beat the odds.

"I am back to try to regain this fantastic result," Trulli said. "In Monaco, anything can happen. This is the only race where you can't really expect anything from anyone."

After last year, the Italian knows that luck can play a part. Trulli had pole position, but slipped behind Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya, the 2003 race winner. Schumacher, warming his tyres behind a safety car, crashed into Montoya and both went out.

"A safety car is enough to completely mix up your strategy," he said. "I won with two safety cars and everything went well. This year, I may even win starting from the back of the grid, you never know."

Streak snapped

Trulli's win halted Schumacher's five-race winning streak, though the German still went on to win a seventh world title.

But mistakes and tyre trouble when following a safety car also caused Schumacher problems at the Spanish GP two weeks ago, when he got a puncture because of the slower speeds.

Renault has done well on the Monaco street circuit because of the extra traction its cars generate, and has improved on last year.

But then, so have Trulli and Toyota. Trulli scored high in his last four races after finishing ninth in the season-opening Australian GP. He has two second-place finishes, a third and a fifth.

Still, he needs to improve on his 13th-place finishes in Thursday's two practice sessions, which Montoya and Alonso led.

"Anything can happen in F1, especially here," Trulli said. "We'll give everything to turn our situation around for the weekend."

Penalty

Meanwhile, Trulli's Toyota teammate Ralf Schumacher will have a half-second penalty in qualifying after stewards said he used a tyre in practice not cleared by the race organisers.

He finished eighth and ninth in the Thursday sessions. The quarter-second difference which will be added to his time from each session would have dropped him about two places. — AP

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