Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Clivio Piccione helps his Monaco squad to score points on maiden A1 appearance.

Monaco bounced back from a disappointing sprint race at Zandvoort to pick up points on its debut in the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport.

The sprint race started behind the Safety Car due to the wet conditions, but the race was over before it even really started for seat-holder Clivio Piccione when Adam Carroll spun coming out of the final corner as the Safety Car pulled in. Piccione was left with nowhere to go and the resultant contact put him out of the race.

Forced to start from the back for the feature race, Piccione made progress through the field before the first round of pitstops although he lost time during his stop due to a wheel gun problem.

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Despite suffering with a broken wing endplate on the car, Piccione was able to stay on track while a number of others ran into problems and took the flag in sixth place to pick up vital points on the team's debut.

“It was difficult starting from the back of the grid for the feature race as visibility was zero,” he said. “It was unbelievably slippery and the car was difficult to handle and to keep on the track, so I said to myself ‘just get to the end of the race'. We were gaining positions lap after lap and I was feeling good in the car. Unfortunately we had a problem in the first pitstop and we lost quite a lot of time. I was then catching the cars in front of me when I overshot the chicane and landed on the grass. I lost a front flap and from there on the car as just un-driveable for a couple of laps, so Graham called me in to remove the broken piece. Unfortunately it was not in the official pitstop window, so we knew that we had to do another stop.

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