Budapest was actually the only race weekend I didn’t make all year. I arrived on the Thursday but then had to leave immediately for personal reasons, but I called Javi after the sprint race on the Sunday and we were both ecstatic. It also made him the first and I think only driver to achieve back-to-back weekend wins which is worth quite a bit, and the only guy who’s had more wins than him this year is
Timo Glock.
Ok, they were all Sunday wins and people say ‘but Saturday wins are worth more’, but that’s not necessarily true, because if you start further back down the grid and plough through the field like Javi has done to put himself on the reverse grid pole position for the sprint race you deserve to be there. It’s not like someone just picked a name out of a hat and put him on pole and he’s won – he actually did the work – so it is very satisfying to get those wins.
What happened to Marcos Martinez at the Hungaroring was a real low. It was a big pity because we actually value him as a very good driver, but when you don’t do any testing beforehand the driver in reality is just being thrown into the deep end. Marcos understood that though, and I think he would have got within 107 per cent, but because he’s quite tall he made the mistake of switching the car off with his knee and he didn’t know what had happened.
Marcos was really whipping himself and feeling very bad afterwards, but without that he would have made 107 per cent and would have been able to race with the rest. I think he deserved that, but the rules are the rules. Even the stewards were saying ‘yeah, it’s a pity but we’ve got to stick to this’ and I have to agree with that, because if you do start allowing drivers in who are over the 107 per cent I don’t like to think what would happen.
![Alfonso de Orleans Borbon - Racing Engineering [pic credit: GP2 media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/163611.jpg)
