We expected more from qualifying there; we had no problems of any sort, it just didn’t work out. There was a lot of pressure on Javi because a number of times it had been said he hadn’t qualified well because he didn’t know the circuit and his engineer was lacking some data, but here there was no excuse. We expected Javi to qualify quite far up but it didn’t exactly happen. Marcos we didn’t expect to do fantastically well because he was still getting to grips with the car, so we just went into the race trying to get the best out of it.
It was a very strange feature race, but probably one of the most beautiful ones of the year because it was raining then it dried and some drivers had started on wets and others on slicks. It was a really exciting race and you could just feel the tension on the grid before the start with everyone talking back and forth – it was absolutely fantastic! The cars were all up on the jacks with either slicks or wets on, and right next to each car they had the opposite set of tyres ready to change because the engineers were still looking into it. They made the final decision three minutes from the start; it was raining just a little bit but the track was dry and we didn’t know what was going to happen. It was difficult for everyone, because strategy played a lot into it and there were a lot of frayed nerves in the pit-lane. When it stopped raining and started drying that made a difference as well.
For us, taking the risk of putting on slicks really worked out. Javi got up to eighth place, which got him a point and was great considering he had started so far back, and Marcos produced probably the single best lap of any driver throughout the whole season; he overtook ten people on the first lap to move up to sixth, which in Valencia in particular is absolutely spectacular given how narrow it is and difficult to pass. It was still wet and he pulled a couple more good moves on other drivers to take fourth. We even asked him after the race, ‘how did you do that?’ and he just said ‘I don’t know!’ That was stunning, a fantastic drive.
![Alfonso de Orleans Borbon - Racing Engineering [pic credit: GP2 media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/163611.jpg)
