Last friday practice for Jordan
Shanghai International Circuit being new for Jordan Grand Prix drivers Tiago Monteiro, Narain Karthikeyan and Nicolas Kiesa, they spent part of the day familiarising themselves with the challenging 5.451-km track, for the last round of the Championship.
Karthikeyan and Kiesa enjoyed a trouble-free day adjusting their cars to the demands of the impressive Chinese circuit and testing different types of Bridgestone tyres. Monteiro lost a bit of time in both sessions due to technical problems with his car. Initially, the three drivers reported a dusty and lacking grip track surface, but as it cleaned up, they started to improve their lap times and were relatively satisfied with the balance of their cars. Nicolas Kiesa did a solid job in his Jordan as he set the 20th best time with Monteiro 23rd and Karthikeyan 24th.
Nicolas Kiesa “This morning the circuit was very green and dusty and we were lacking grip. It is quite hard to determine with which tyre to go for because no matter what we were doing, the car was not behaving as normal. But at the end of the first session, the circuit started to get grip back and we were able to do the last run and set better lap times. We went into the second session without being really sure how to start but we made some set-up changes for the first lap which turned out to be very good and we did not change the car for the rest of the session.”
Tiago Monteiro “It was a difficult first day for me as I experienced a few technical issues in both sessions. I had to learn the track as I have never been here and spent some time on that. We also tried to get a good car balance but unfortunately I did not do as many laps as we wanted to as I had problems. We have to find out what happened and keep on working on the set-up of the car tomorrow.”
Narain Karthikeyan “I had a good day here at Shanghai. The tyre choice for the rest of the weekend will be critical because the long corners are hard on the front tyres and we have to look after them as much as possible in order not to grain them. We will have to choose carefully between the soft tyres and the hard ones. We will go through the data this afternoon and tonight but I am sure it will take us some time as the two compounds that Bridgestone have brought are very close. This is not an easy circuit to learn as it is pretty hard to get the line straight and it is very important to have good brakes because of the long straights.”
Adrian Burgess, Sporting Director “The three drivers went through the standard Friday programme and learnt the circuit as well, as it was new to them all. It was not a bad day and we are happy with where we are with our strategy compared to Minardi. We will make our normal choices tonight such as tyre selection and this will be difficult here but I am confident we will make a good choice. We also have a couple of reliability issues we will have to look at tonight but we should be ok.”
