Our qualifying admittedly hasn’t been that great, mostly not because of set-up or due to the team or anything like that, it’s mostly because Javi tends to take time to get into the weekend, but once he’s there he is absolutely there. Obviously he was very upset not to have won any Saturday races, but if you have a problem in qualifying that obviously affects the whole weekend – having just half an hour’s free practice and half an hour’s qualifying makes things very, very tight. I’m sure if Javi had just an extra half hour’s free practice he would be starting much higher up on the grid. That’s something we will be working on this winter, so we can hopefully have him qualifying in much better positions in 2008.
Overall we had a good package; it just didn’t work out from a points perspective with all those races where we had gearbox issues or back at the start of the year with the engine problems. We lost a lot of points, and I think one of the people who can sympathise with Javi is
Timo Glock, because he nearly lost the championship with all the problems he had and thank God he didn’t, because he really deserved it.
It’s a shame that in the second car we really didn’t have the same driver season-long to give us the points to help the team finish in a much higher position. It was a pity we ran out of a budget with Sergio Jimenez, because he was quite good. After that we really put all our hopes on Ernesto Viso, and then he had his spectacular accident at Magny-Cours; we were just happy that he walked away from that. We then had to get another driver, and both Repsol and Telefonica said ‘why don’t you put in a Spanish driver?’ so we turned to Marcos who we knew was good. We didn’t think he was going to get any points, but at least he would be able to get some experience for 2008. You could always tell his talent was there; all he really needs is more mileage and more experience.
![Alfonso de Orleans Borbon - Racing Engineering [pic credit: GP2 media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/163611.jpg)
