Accident for Albers, Monteiro finishes
Midland F1's strongest weekend of the season ended in disaster for Christijan Albers as he was pushed into an accident on the first lap. Tiago Monteiro, brought the remaining car home safely in 16th place.
The team take to the test track again at Silverstone next week where the team will work to resolve all the issues encountered this weekend in readiness for the next race at the Nurburgring.
Tiago Monteiro "Another finish, which is important of course, because every finish gives us more data to work with. We had two strategy options, depending on how the start went. Actually, it was our best start so far this season, so I managed to stay in front of Sato and from that point I was just pushing hard to follow the Torro Rossos. I couldn't do that, but in that type of situation, you have to keep pushing hard the whole race, because you never know what might happen to those ahead of you. So you push to explore the potential of the car and you push to improve your focus and concentration over a race distance. It's actually not too bad, because we learned a lot. Personally, I discover new things about the car every time out. Unfortunately, we're in a situation where we get overtaken, but we analyse this to see where our opponents are quicker. Obviously, this is not where we want to be - we would prefer to be fighting with the others - but I think our pace is improving all the time. We just need a little bit more, and we're almost there."
Christijan Albers "For me, this was really a bad end to the weekend. It's a shame, because we had a fantastic start. On Friday, we were really quick; we were on the pace. On Saturday morning, we were also pretty quick. And then the bad luck started: we had a software problem on the engine side that held us back in qualifying. For me, this was really, really sad, because I felt we had a chance to make it into the second qualifying heat, even though we still had a lot of fuel in the car. And then, during the race, I felt I had a reasonable start that ended up being wasted by an unnecessary race incident. With all due respect to the Super Aguri drivers, they are being much too aggressive in trying to jump ahead of us at the start so that they can hold us up during the race, as they've done in the past. They are taking too many risks, and we saw today how dangerous this can be. I don't understand this tactic, because I would have conceded the position to (Ide) had he been in a position to take it. I had a lot of fuel on board and driving to a certain strategy, so I wasn't trying to hold anyone up. But instead, he just pushed me off the road from behind. It's too bad, because the car is severely damaged. The team worked very hard to give me a good car this weekend, and they deserved a better result than this."
Colin Kolles, Managing Director "It was not such a good weekend, to say the least. Tiago did a good job to bring the car home under difficult circumstances, after his car developed a problem. As for Christijan, well, it's obvious what happened and it was certainly not his fault."
Dominic Harlow, Chief Race and Test Engineer "Thankfully, Christijan's OK after being shunted off on the first lap. Sadly, it's just one of those things. Tiago brought the car home in P16 and given the problems he had, that was probably the best we could have hoped for. We've got some things to work on to get ready for the next one, but we're up for the challenge."
