We then had Filipe Albuquerque subbing for Ernesto at
Silverstone, and he had never been to the circuit or driven that car before. He knows the team a bit because he was Javi’s team-mate in Formula 3 in 2005, but he didn’t know his engineer, the car or the track. He had to start from zero, and he spun after 500 metres in free practice which really didn’t help. He basically had to learn everything during qualifying, but he ended up doing quite well and even lined up in front of Javi on the grid. After that the whole weekend was playing catch-up, but I think he did relatively well.
Javi, for his part, just couldn’t get to grips with the car and the track was extremely bumpy. He started with a set-up which was very different to what he had expected, and obviously since we have so little practice time that caused him quite a few problems. They had to change a lot of things, and on the Saturday he tried to go through the field as usual but the car still wasn’t perfect.
They figured out what they needed to do for Sunday, though, and the car was quite decent, but then he started losing engine power and couldn’t understand why. The car was overheating and when he came into the pits we saw he had a tear-off in one of the radiators. We sent him back out again to see how the car was but it was still overheating, so instead of risking any engine damage we just decided to stop.
It was a bit of a pity the race was wrecked because of a simple thing like that – these cars shouldn’t be overheating just because of a tear-off; that doesn’t happen in
Formula 1. They are so delicate and we maybe shouldn’t be running these radiator configurations, but that’s what we’ve got at the moment and hopefully the 2008 car will be much better built in that respect.
