In his latest exclusive column for Crash.net, Racing Engineering team owner Alfonso de Orleans-Borbon reflects on a rollercoaster ride in Magny-Cours, coming back down to earth with a bump at Silverstone and what he hopes will be a more ‘normal’ weekend at the Nürburgring in six days’ time…
Magny-Cours was crazy, a very strange weekend. We started off with Ernesto Viso coming on-board in place of Sergio Jimenez, and we had to adapt the car for him. Sergio is a fantastic guy and we’d love to have him back in the team, but his management were very up-front and honest, telling us ‘we’re running out of budget and we only have enough to get up to Monaco’. They told us with sufficient time which allowed us to organise the test at Paul Ricard to find another driver.
We tried Sergio Hernandez, but he wasn’t fit enough to be able to race in GP2 so we had to find another solution, and then when Ernesto wasn’t able to race with FMS, we thought ‘fantastic’. We had wanted to work together for quite a bit of time, and we were finally able to hook up and get together.
We knew we were going to have a good car – we had a good car during testing at Paul Ricard and Javier Villa was on his roll, so what we had to do was just get everything ready for Ernesto as well. He wasn’t entirely happy with it – we had a decent car but it wasn’t made for him, so we had a bit of brain-wracking there to get it all together, but we seemed to have managed it because in Saturday’s race he really ploughed through the field. In fact he ploughed through so much he actually ended up flying. It was a pretty horrific crash.
