Narain Karthikeyan: “In the morning we didn’t have the best of starts, I lost a lot of time because there were some issues with the oil level in the car. The balance is alright, now we are just exploring what the car is doing. There are a lot of things to work on. The second session was good, we only did 15 laps because there was an issue with the car that lost me half an hour again. We’ve done 25 timed laps so we still have a lot of catching up to do and that’s what we’re doing. The point is not to complain with what you have but try and get the best out of it.”
Vitantonio Liuzzi: “The morning session went alright, we started with hard tyres and couldn’t do many laps because we spent most of the time doing aero-setting in order to understand the balance of the car. But we did some laps and the car didn’t look too bad. We had some issues with the balance, a few traction problems also. Therefore we made some changes for the afternoon. The afternoon session wasn’t easy because we had an issue similar to Australia with a switch. Basically after riding over a bump, the ignition switch turned off and the car stopped. So I had to stop when we were starting our new tyre runs which was a great shame because we didn’t get to test as much as we wanted. When we got out to d o our last lap there was a lot of traffic so we weren’t able to test and evaluate the tyres.”
Colin Kolles, Hispania Racing Team Principal: “Although Narain and Tonio were forced to stop today, they were minor issues as proven by the fact that they were able to get back out on the track again. All in all we could say today was a good day, I believe we made some progress and will make some more tomorrow as this is our first real test of the new car. It’s good news that Narain was under the 107%. We didn’t run a qualifying set-up today and the car didn’t look too bad, we didn’t have any reliability issues just a small problem with a switch which we will have to sort out for tomorrow. Our target is to improve as quickly as possible, the only way to do this is by working consistently and pushing, you can’t get anywhere by complaining and feeling sorry for yourself. We have new updates which will hopefully be completed for Turkey, we have a wind tunnel programme in place, everything is falling into place, now we have to work on it in order to take another step forward.”
