Hungarian GP Jaguar race notes

A bitter end to an extremely disappointing weekend for Jaguar Racing. On his first lap Eddie Irvine spun-off into Turn 1 and retired from the race. Pedro de la Rosa drove a strong and relentless race on a two-stop strategy to bring his Jaguar R2 home in 11 th position, having started from 13th position on the grid. The team is now focused on concentrating their efforts towards the two-day testing programme at Silverstone next week. With only four races left and four constructors points from the season so far, Jaguar Racing must endeavour to qualify higher at the forthcoming races to be in with a chance of scoring points.

Pedro de la Rosa
"We were expecting much more from this tight and twisty track and I am disappointed with coming away from the weekend with no points or even being close to fighting for points. We knew it was going to be hard after the morning warm-up session and my first set of tyres began blistering quickly after about five laps. My first stint was quite slow because of this and I was struggling out there with a lack of rear grip. After taking new tyres at the pitstop, my race pace improved a lot but I was too far back to make a serious tend in today's race. We've been made to look average this weekend and it's not an easy one to understand given our recent performances on high downforce set-ups. Nonetheless, we will continue to work hard and over time, I'm sure we'll get there. Progress has certainly been made this year but we are not there yet."

Eddie Irvine
"That's probably one of the shortest races ever for me. It was my fault completely. I was running down the dusty side of the track and simply went into turn one too fast. The back end of the car spun around but I couldn't catch it in time. It's been a very disappointing weekend from the minute we arrived. I haven't been able to get the best out of the car all weekend and starting from fourteenth on the grid was always a tall order in terms of points contention. I made a big charge at the beginning but maybe I carried too much into the corner and paid the price. With so few races left and only four points earned from the season so far, we've got to address the issues before Spa. I really thought we could achieve something here because of the high downforce nature of the circuit, but we were obviously not as strong as we hoped."

Bobby Rahal
"That's not the weekend anybody envisaged and it's difficult at this stage to know exactly why our performance was so different to our expectations. We've worked very hard on developing the aero package on this car and relative gains have been generated all season. This circuit, however, should have been kinder to us. Eddie admittedly made a mistake into turn one and it's a big shame to lose out like that but I question how realistic our chances would have been anyway. Pedro drove a hard and determined race and I couldn't have asked for more. We'll carry on developing the car in the hope that we can salvage some points from the remaining races."

-Jaguar