Looking for improvement in Malaysia
The action gets underway again in Malaysia on Friday, just four days after the season opener in Bahrain, and there’s barely been time for anyone to catch their breath. Some members of the MF1 Racing team dashed back to Silverstone on Sunday night and have squeezed in a couple of days at the factory before heading out to Kuala Lumpur. Most of the crew members barely had a day off, and after packing everything away in Bahrain, went straight to Malaysia to unload and begin preparing the cars in the garages.
The schedule means there’s been little time to make many changes, but the team has been hard at work to address the frustrating driveshaft-related issue that afflicted both cars in Bahrain. Tiago Monteiro had a problem just before the start and took the T-car for the race, while Christijan Albers was struck on the grid and barely moved off the line.
Monteiro at least managed to maintain his good finishing record, but for Albers, such a short race day after months of preparation was incredibly frustrating.
“It was a weekend when we had a few problems, but that’s the way it goes sometimes, unfortunately,” says the Dutchman. “You want to get some more experience, you want to get some more data from the car, and it’s just a shame that we couldn’t have that. I am not so interested in just watching a race any more. I’m here to compete!
“I think it was possible to do good lap times, even better than we did in qualifying, because I knew that the tyres would come in within a few laps. In qualifying, we didn’t have time for that. I think on race speed, we would have been able to do lap times like the team in front of us.”
Albers says it’s too early to determine how the season will develop.
“It’s difficult to tell how competitive everybody is. We’ll have to see in Malaysia. It’s nice and hot, so it’s good for our conditioning, at least!”
For MF1 Sporting Relations Manager Johnny Herbert, Malaysia holds special memories. He raced for Stewart in the first event in 1999, and then the following year made his final Grand Prix start, this time under the Jaguar Racing banner – although it ended rather badly when a car problem pitched him off the road!
Herbert admits that Bahrain didn’t go as well as it should have, and he’s expecting better results this weekend.
“We were disappointed in qualifying, because we thought we should have done better than that,” says Herbert. “Then we had the problems at the beginning of the race. It’s typical, you go through testing and don’t have them, and then you come to the first race and you do! It had nothing to do with the heat. We hadn’t had it during the practice days, and they’d been practising starts. So we’ll learn from that. It was disappointing in the race, because we didn’t have the pace we should have. We’ve got to move on and improve on what we’ve done.”
Despite the poor performance, he feels the team has made great steps since last season.
“It looks better than last year already. The level is higher, but you’re competing against everyone else that has moved forward and will carry on moving forward, because development is what it’s all about. People will come back from these first two races, look at what’s happened to them, and say, ‘Right, what have we got to work on?’”
