Marussia Virgin Friday Report

Australian GP

We thought Australia would be warm and sunny. Turns out that it's grey and cold. Today, in Melbourne it was, anyway. Timo and Jérôme appreciated their nice warm coats today, because it was a little on the cool side at Albert Park. For the second session of Free Practice for Sunday's Australian Grand Prix the team had made some progress after analysing the data from the first session, and both drivers were out on track for most of the session, completing a total of 66 laps between them. Both cars ran reliably, and the two drivers were often lapping within a tenth of a second of each other. Which is how it turned out at the end of the session. Jérôme was classified 21st with a lap of 1m32.106s, Timo hot on his heels with 1m32.135s Timo Glock

“Not an easy first day. I had a bit of trouble this morning in terms of the setup, and the behaviour of the car was not right, quite difficult. In the second session we made some improvements but the gap to the top guys is quite big and that's a bit disappointing. We have to make the best out of it, get on top of it and make the car quicker.”

Jérôme D’Ambrosio

“Today has been something very special for me for sure. I have been racing since I was eight years old so today is a dream come true. It was very exciting to drive out of the garage this morning and also to drive here in Albert Park for the first time. It’s a fantastic track and I like it very much, so a lot of great things to be happy with. We have some work to do to improve, that is clear, but this is only the beginning. We showed that we could make progress through both sessions so we have to get the best out of the package we have here and then keep pushing to improve.”

John Booth, Team Principal

“This morning’s session wasn’t as smooth a start to the season as we would have liked, but we resolved a sensor calibration issue with Timo as soon as possible and got ourselves back on course. The conditions were very slippery and there was little grip due to last night’s rain, so most of the teams were waiting for the track to improve. In the afternoon we were able to complete plenty of laps and both drivers are doing a good job. Clearly we’re not where we need to be at the moment so we have to study the data and look at what we can do to improve. Congratulations to Jérôme on a great debut today.”