For qualifying I was on it from the word go. The car felt really good in drying conditions and these being my favorite conditions I reckoned we were on for a good qualifying. With three minutes to go I was lying in 14th place overall and second in the independents, a result I would have been very happy with. But the qualifying was red flagged and when we restarted we had just those three minutes remaining. In that red-flagged time the circuit had dried out completely and everyone changed to slicks. At the restart I chased and chased the two Muller’s in the works BMW’s but I made a mistake just after Hotel Corner and luckily managed to keep going. I ended up in 21st overall and sixth in the Indys.
In the first race my start was not the best I have had this season. I got bogged down with wheelspin but held my own coming into the first corner. I was running in 20th place in the race and I was not really comfortable. I didn’t really understand why the car was nervous with oversteer causing me to have some big slides on a few occasions each lap! On lap four disaster struck again. As I changed from fourth gear to third gear I found I had a box of neutrals; I managed to find fifth and get it home to the pits which was a blessing considering that there is only 30 minutes between each race.
Wiechers Sport did a fantastic job changing the gearbox in 20 minutes, but my feeling is that they are getting too much practice at changing gearboxes! We really have to get to the bottom of our gearbox reliability as my team-mate Diego Rominini also had a gearbox failure in the second race.
