Michael Devaney achieved all-new outfit Ultimate Motorsport’s highest grid position during its maiden British F3 campaign in 2007, and came close to standing up on the rostrum on more than one occasion. Here the Irishman looks back on a season that went from strength-to-strength, and forwards to the next step…
On reflection, 2007 has been quite positive to be honest. We came in with a brand new car and team, and we’ve come on a long way from where we started at
Oulton Park back in April when we were over three seconds off the pace.
It was a massive learning curve back at the start, but I think it was good that everyone was on that learning curve. With the new team and car everyone bonded really early in the season and that worked very well. There was a lot of hard work along the way, but there was also a great atmosphere inside the team and we progressed very well. Towards the end of the season we were challenging the front-runners a lot of the time.
We were hoping to have quite a lot of development during the year from Mygale, but unfortunately we didn’t get as much as we wanted. Zolder was quite an interesting weekend, because we had the hub failure in practice and had no spare parts. Barry took the decision to run with a Dallara for qualifying and the race, so we went into qualifying blind with no set-up or anything on the car, and immediately we could match the times we had been setting with the Mygale. Driving it, you could tell the Dallara was more of a solid chassis and much better aerodynamically. Even though the result wasn’t great, we still learnt things that we were able to put onto the Mygale set-up wise which improved it quite a bit.
