Traffic trouble for Monteiro

Due to traffic problems, Tiago Monteiro was unable to qualify any higher than 20th for the third Grand Prix of the season in Melbourne.

Tiago Monteiro.

Photo by xpb.cc.

During the hour-long practice session on Saturday morning Monteiro showed more of the pace he could have achieved, had he not been plagued by traffic. In practice he was 16th after 7 laps and a time of 1.39.515.

"The conditions were very different from Friday with rain showers and unexpected cool temperatures," Monteiro said. "That meant that the wet weather conditions prevented us from evaluating different tyre options. The track was damp and the conditions tricky with less traction and cars more difficult to drive."

In the afternoon two red flags stopped the short 15-minute first part of qualifying. "Overall, it was not a good day. Even if in the afternoon the conditions improved and the track surface dried. Even then, I could not even get a run with a clear lap."

"The new qualifying format should be good fun with all cars back on track at the same time, completing multiple laps, but today it more or less looked like a traffic problem. I am quite disappointed because on both my flying laps, I could not get up to speed with slower cars ahead of me getting in the way."

"But on the positive side, when we analyzed the results with my engineers, the telemetry results showed clearly that I was 3 tenths of a second quicker than my team-mate in the fast chicane. I have to say I'm pleased about that, even if we didn't make it through to the final shoot-out this time."

"The potential of the car is there for tomorrow even though I'll start from 20th. The race is long here, anything can happen ahead of us at the start of the race. It is not an easy track to manage for overtaking so it will be an interesting race tomorrow. I hope that we'll have a good race and that I'll manage to bring the car home in a good position."

-dca-