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The start of the 2008 season has been very tough for all the team. Courage was already racing in LMP1 in the Le Mans Series last year, but they have completely rebuilt the car. We’re running with a new engine – the Judd – and Courage did all the body kit and aerodynamic stuff and electronics. It was a very busy winter for us. We started to run with a hybrid car in January, and since then we have been testing almost every week over the intervening four months. It’s pretty tough, but we are getting there.
Now we have had the first two races in Barcelona and Monza. There was no way we were prepared for Barcelona when it came around – we had just had the new aero kit, which arrived only two days before the weekend so we hadn’t had the chance to test it beforehand. That meant Barcelona was pretty much a test for us. It was quite hard to set up the car, but still we found some good pace there and were able to qualify seventh. During the race we were running in fourth position, but then we had the gearbox problem.
We did some testing in-between Barcelona and Monza – we had a day at Magny-Cours, which was very useful. At Monza the good thing was we had two new cars – at Barcelona the #6 car was new, but the #5 of Stéphane Ortelli and Soheil Ayari was the old one, so we didn’t have much information. From now we have two new cars, so we can run both and get much more information. That will make it easier and faster for us to get the right set-up for the car on a race weekend.
![ORECA-MATMUT's Nicolas Lapierre at Barcelona in 2008 [pic credit: DPPI]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/438579.jpg)
