The Hindu : Sport : Our new car is showing promise

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 10, 2005

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Sport

Our new car is showing promise

With just a week's break between the two races, we did not get a chance for any track testing

NARAIN KARTHIKEYAN

The mood for Sunday's race in Silverstone, U.K. will definitely be very sombre, due to the multiple bombings in London a few days back. Even though we are a couple of hundred kilometres away from the capital, the general mood all around U.K. is sad and depressing. Our cars will be running with the front nose painted black as a sign of mourning for those killed in the blasts. This is our team's home race as Jordan is based right next to Silverstone. There will also be a minute's silence before the start of the race.

My last outing in France was a disappointing end to what was a really great weekend. I had good pace throughout practice and qualifying. I also had a great start and I managed to overtake the Red Bull racing car in the opening lap. But soon our car developed a gearbox problem and we lost our third and fifth gear. This obviously hampered my racing and I had to be content with just nursing the car back home. It is very important to finish the race as it not only gives you more track experience but a better chance for qualifying for the next race.

With just a week's break between the two races, we did not get a chance for any track testing. Friday's practice was helpful and I managed to complete close to about forty laps. We had a better set-up for the car in the morning session as compared to the afternoon one, in which I was a bit slower.

Our new car is now really showing promise. It is about a second faster than our present car and even the reliability issues seems to have been taken care of. I just cannot wait till the Hockeinheim circuit in two weeks time when we get to use that car.

Great circuit

The Silverstone circuit is a great one and I have been here before on several occasions. There are a lot of fast corners on this circuit. The Beckets corner is a flat out seventh gear series of corners where we are in speed of around 300 km/h and feeling immense amount of positive G's.

We haven't made any changes in the car or the tyres for this race. It will basically be the same package as we have had so far. As mentioned before I am just looking forward to our new car in the next race.

The Mclaren Mercedes is the most superior team at Silverstone and I expect them to have considerable advantage in this race. On the other hand everyone predicts the Renaults and the Ferraris would struggle here.

TCM

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