Luca Filippi: New surroundings.

Tuesday, 29th July 2008

In his latest column for Crash.net, Luca Filippi looks back at the GP2 Series weekend at Hockenheim, his first race since switching from ART to Arden.

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In qualifying I was okay on the first set but I think maybe it was possible to go a little bit faster, but then with the second set the circuit was slower because the temperatures dropped, so I couldn't improve: it was a shame, but bit by bit the car was feeling better for me. I wanted to do better, of course, but I could see that it will come.

In the first race I had a good start and was up to P9, and then I had Petrov in front of me and got past him for P8, but he is really hard to get past and in passing him I had to go a little bit wide, which meant Parente got past both of us and I only had the position for a few seconds! That was my position for the rest of the race until the end when I was suffering a little bit of rear locking and was losing some time and some positions: the brake pedal was just getting longer and longer, so I was already thinking I would have to retire.

But then it started to rain! I really wanted to push and maybe make up some positions, and I thought it was exactly the possibility I needed, but I was really pushing and because of the little brake problem I made a mistake and spun off, and the engine went down unfortunately so I couldn't restart and that was it.

But for me it was a good race for getting used to the car: I was just behind Parente for a long time which was quite good, because he ended up on the podium, so I was a little disappointed that I went off. Of course, that meant in race two I started from the back, and Herck stalled in front of me so I avoided him, but somehow he got restarted again when I was there and he hit my rear wheel and there was nothing I could do.

Of course the result of this race is not the best, but I am at Arden and I have a really good feeling with the team, and we still have four races to go: one is a new circuit for everybody, and two of the other races are the two best weekends for me last year, Spa and Monza, so I still have a chance to come back and to prove myself that I can still score points, podiums, and then back to the top.

Until next time,

Luca

For more information on Luca Filippi, visit http://www.lucafilippi.com.