The Ultimate Motorsport team has shown in its pace in qualifying at
Croft, with all three cars inside the top eight for the opening race of the British F3 International Series weekend although second qualifying wouldn't quite go to plan.
The pace of the team's Mygale-Mercedes package was underlined by an extremely strong performance in qualifying one. Michael Devaney was fourth just one thousandth of a second ahead of his team mate Esteban Guerrieri in fifth. Ricardo Teixeira was eighth, but set exactly the same time as the man in seventh, to the nearest thousandth of a second. However as the Angolan had set his time afterwards, he was given eighth place on the grid.
I was pleased with our performance in qualifying one, he said, not just with our place on the grid, but also because we were only three-tenths of a second off the pole position time. It's going to be a very competitive weekend.
Qualifying two got off to a bad start for Devaney, who had to come into the pits for the team to investigate a technical problem. The rest of the session was delayed by two red flags and with the schedule now running late, the final seven minutes of qualifying was scrapped robbing the Ultimate Motorsport drivers of a chance to improve on their times.
We really needed those last seven minutes of qualifying two and we didn't get them, which has obviously compromised our race severely, he said. We're just going to have to try and make the very best of race one now, and aim for the podium.
Devaney will start race two from the back of the field as a result with Teixeira in 21st and Guerrieri left to lead the Ultimate challenge in eighth.
The cars are clearly very competitive here, but I actually felt that we could have got a little more out of them, he said. I was luckier than my team mates during qualifying two, but I was still encountering really bad traffic a lot of the time.
