In race two at Monza Javi’s clutch went while he was leading on the opening lap. That was probably the biggest low point of the whole season, and you could tell it really did affect Javi. He at first got upset with the team thinking it was an error we had made, but sadly enough he had used the clutch too much and what had happened was that at the start it just burnt out. I think part of the reason he got such a good start was that the clutch was already failing – I wouldn’t say it was like traction control, but it definitely helped, even though Javi is very good at doing starts anyway. He was able to get into the first corner, but then when he asked for that gear it didn’t come. Everyone in the team was heartbroken. It was the hardest hit of the season, for me especially.
Spa-Francorchamps was new ground for both Javi and Marcos, but they got to grips with it quite quickly. Javi likes these fast, flowing circuits – that’s where he’s at his best – and he felt immediately at one with the track and qualified quite well. Marcos took a little longer – he’s never been particularly quick at adapting to a track he doesn’t know. He found that going through Eau Rouge he was getting a little bit of oversteer at the top, and it’s obviously quite dangerous there to not have a perfect car so we needed to work with it a little bit, but when the car was good he was happy with it and ready to race. He was very satisfied on the Saturday – sure, he didn’t finish in the points but he was happy with how he ran – and leading for a bit on the Sunday was special; he was obviously very happy about that.
Spa is
the drivers’ circuit and
the place to overtake. From a points perspective the weekend wasn’t that amazing, but from a visual point-of-view not only were we very impressed with Javi’s performance, but so were the fans. Both drivers did a great job and we got a lot of fan mail so overall it was a very satisfying weekend.
![Alfonso de Orleans Borbon - Racing Engineering [pic credit: GP2 media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/163611.jpg)
