What a disaster Malaysia turned out to be for me! I was pretty confident of a fairly good result here as I had done some F3 racing at the place last season, and thought that I might have a slight advantage over some in the race, but this was not to be.
I think my experience here did show in practice and qualifying though. Friday was spent as usual dialling in a good setup for qualifying and the race. I was into the 42s pretty quickly which was a shock. Most other guys were struggling to find setup, and for a time I topped the time sheets with a 41.786.
It doesn't take these guys long to catch on to how to drive a track fast, and by qualifying on Saturday I knew that they had learnt the track and I had lost any advantage I thought I had. Marco however was still struggling, as were the Hawkeye guys who also run Audi engines. The engine is pretty ordinary at the moment, and isn't providing the acceleration required to get the car out of the slow corners. On the fast sweeping type tracks it is fine.
I had a trouble free qualifying session, and for the first time this year I set my fastest lap of the weekend during the session which counts! A fastest lap of 1:41.075 was to put me 8th on the grid behind Neumann, Hoek, Dickson (making a return for BA Racing), Lindberg, Pyrick, Karam and Wilson.
I was pretty happy with the grid position, as it was almost 2 seconds faster than Marco and they say first you should beat your team mate! :) Beyond that though, it was over 2 seconds faster than both the Hawkeye drivers, so I felt I well and truly got the best from the Audi during qualifying.
The Sunday warm up went well enough, setting 7th fastest time. However when preparing to leave the pits for the parade lap prior to the grand prix, my race car wouldn't fire. It was diagnosed later as a problem with the 'black box', however I was forced into the spare car for the grand prix, which was still set up for Marco as he had also suffered an engine problem in the morning warmup and had used the spare car.
My wing settings were added to the car, however there was not time to change the gear ratios which were setup for Marco. I made a good start but rapidly went backwards over the course of the first lap as the car was simply horrible with the disparity of the wing and ratio setup.
I had struggled through almost three laps, when I spun turning into the final hairpin onto the pit straight. As soon as I had changed down into second, the back end let go and it spun 180 degrees and then stalled. That was it, my first Malaysian Grand Prix was over.
Marco went on to finish a distant 10th place, which was a credit to him as I know he struggled throughout the race also. We are planning to work even harder to fix some of the problems we are facing, but I think the best thing we could both invest in is a pedal and steering set so we can use analogue instead of digital controls. This is worth a fair bit of time I am told, and I am certain we would be very very competitive with this equipment change.
The grand prix was won by Neumann, who is to be congratulated for his outstanding efforts during the entire weekend. Hoek was second, and set the fastest lap of 1:41.084 (almost as fast as my qualifying time!), followed by Pyrik, Dickson in a fine return drive, then Jason Smith, Scott Smith (a good double for DL Racing), Visscher, Lindberg, Karam, Rosas, Moreira and in last place Lissens.
So to Brazil where I hope my luck swings for the better. See you all in a few days for the Brazilian Grand Prix report.
Cheers.
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