But then the car seemed to suite my driving style - higher powered car seemed to be more natural to me - I got on with it very well. So yeah, after doing that test it showed me that I could be quick straight from the off and made going into European F3000 with very limited testing a much easier decision, because we knew that we could cope with it.
Q:
You put the car on the front row at
Donington, but the race didn’t exactly go to plan - how much of a disappointment was that, given that it was your home round?
Alex Lloyd:
That was the biggest disappointment. The first couple of rounds were difficult because I didn’t know the circuits and some of them I only had half an hour before qualifying. But at Donington I felt at home, because I knew the track very well, I’d started to get the hang of the car by then and in every session we’d been half a second quicker and put it on pole by I think over four tenths.
I felt really comfortable; we had a big box of sponsors there - everybody had come to watch - and I thought ‘this is perfect’ it couldn’t have gone better, and then the driveshaft went on the warm-up lap. So I had to start from the pitlane and it was race over really.
That was a big disappointment - probably the biggest disappointment I’ve had in my career actually - in terms of the build-up and hype that we’d put towards that race. The next round at Dijon was only a week or so later and we managed to get things together there, by taking the pole and winning the race, so that was a nice feeling to have at least made up for that straight away, but yeah it was a very disappointing time.
Q:
Do you believe if you’d done the whole season you would have been in with a shout of challenging Nicky Pastorelli for the title?
Alex Lloyd:
In the rounds that we did we had a number of mechanical problems which was not the team’s fault, basically we were on such a limited budget - we did the job on a third of the budget we should have done - so it was very, very difficult.
