Ultimate Motorsport team manager Jonny Ostrowski reflects on a strong mid-season run for the fledgling British F3 outfit, and looks ahead to the possibility of finally breaking their podium duck in the last round of the 2007 campaign at Rockingham this weekend…
As the season has gone on and we’ve learnt more about the car we’ve had increasingly high hopes, though qualifying has been a bit of an Achilles’ heel for us this year, partly due to our inexperience and lack of understanding of how the tyres work. We are now performing better in qualifying but maybe not quite so well in the races; the two are evening out a bit more.
There are slight differences between the two cars that we can’t fully understand. Esteban Guerrieri’s is certainly much better off the line; we’ve put the same sort of set-up onto Michael Devaney’s car and he can now get off the line better, but then race pace is affected. Mick’s car can be either quick off the line or quick in the race, whereas Esteban’s is more of a happy medium as it were.
We had some upgrades for Spa back at the end of July and were looking quite good in the first race, but then Esteban unfortunately had a brake problem into the Bus Stop chicane which dropped him back considerably and affected the outcome. We’ve been knocking on the door of the podium and Esteban was closing on the leaders at the time, so who knows what might have happened? We can only assume that we could have got that elusive podium at that point.
Michael Devaney had braking problems throughout the weekend, which was a knock-on effect and I think we lost another hub there, which is a problem we’ve had all season. We’ve been unable to rectify that so it has been an ongoing problem, but we’re managing to get around it. We have found a few things that have given us some more pace though, and that was encouraging.
Following that the next stop for Ultimate was the Zolder F3 Masters outing. We had been to Magny-Cours for the F3 Euroseries grand prix-supporting round a month earlier, so we knew what we were up against. I would say there are more Euroseries teams that are up to the mark perhaps than in British F3. We knew we were in for a tough weekend, but still we had come away from Magny-Cours with a fifth place so we equally knew anything was possible.
