Amongst the British contingent, Esteban ran second to championship leader Marko Asmer through most of the race, just a couple of tenths behind him. Unfortunately he later had a bit of an ‘off’ which dropped him back a bit, but overall it was a highly positive performance.
Michael unfortunately didn’t have such a straightforward weekend, and again this goes back to the problem we’ve had with the hubs. We basically ran out of parts, which meant we couldn’t safely run Mick’s car. We had to withdraw it from the race and then that was going to be it, but the chance came up for us to borrow a car from another team. We knew it wasn’t their full-spec race car and that we’d be up against it, but it was a chance to get Mick into the race and that’s what we were there for.
We knew we were going to have a late night, and indeed it was an all-nighter – there was no way we were going to get home that night. The guys did an excellent job to get it all ready in time, but then unfortunately Mick was taken out on the second lap which obviously after all the work we had put in was a bit of a tough one. Still, it was a good team bonding experience for all involved…if you can describe staying up all night working as a good experience!
Following that we returned to Britain, and obviously at
Silverstone we were competing in front of our ‘home’ fans. It was a good weekend for us. Mick hadn’t ever raced on the grand prix layout before, so to qualify third was extremely satisfying. It was probably the first time – in qualifying at least – that everything had come together correctly as an engineering team, taking everything into consideration, and it worked magically.
It was a really good moment for us and the culmination of a lot of hard work. To go out and get third – given back at the start of the year we were almost four seconds off the pace – was quite an achievement, and it was purely thanks to the hard work of the engineering side and Mick understanding the car.
