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Silverstone: Javier Villa preview

SILVERSTONE PREVIEW Two weeks ago, at the French track of Magny Cours, the GP2 series started its frantic summer season, with a race every fifteen days that means for Javier Villa starting a key moment of the year. With no more test sessions ...

SILVERSTONE PREVIEW

Two weeks ago, at the French track of Magny Cours, the GP2 series started its frantic summer season, with a race every fifteen days that means for Javier Villa starting a key moment of the year. With no more test sessions before the end of the season everything will be decided on the six race weekends remaining in the schedule of the F1 feeder series, starting this Friday with the visit to one of the most historic tracks in the world of motorsport: Silverstone.

At the British track Villa hopes to find the solution to the problems that prevented him from getting the expected results in the first four races of the season, with Magny Cours as the lowest point so far. In the French race the young Spaniard had a really tough weekend as, for no logical reason, the car performances were up and down, a high being among the fastest in free practice or setting the third best lap in Sunday race, and the lows as being out off the pace in both qualifying and Saturday's race. A lack of consistency Javi can't explain so he is waiting anxiously for the start of Silverstone free practice on Friday in order to try to be back on the pace as he was in the test sessions held before the French race.

The British race meeting will be the fifth of the year, which means arriving at the midway point in the 2008 GP2 series schedule, so the results have to arrive as soon as possible. Javi has shown several times since the beginning of the year that he can run as fast as or even faster than his team mate at Racing Engineering, Giorgio Pantano, who leads the series right now, but in the four races held so far he has been unable to transform these fast laptimes into good results. A good finish at Silverstone would be perfect to relaunch Javi's campaign and put him in a position to become one of the main contenders for the second part of the season.

Silverstone always means a special challenge for any racing driver given its special characteristics, which are not really similar to any other track in the schedule. Despite losing through the years some of its initial focus on high speed thanks to its succession of straights and very fast corners, Silverstone remains one of the quickest tracks and is also one of the more complicated to setup the car for. Being, at the same time, fast enough at high speed corners such as Maggotts-Becketts-Chapel without loosing time through the slow 'complex' than closes each lap means the search for a compromise in downforce which is not easy to find. This will be the first key for Villa in order to be in the best position to fight for a good grid slot for Saturday's race, something crucial to start changing his luck this weekend and give him the awaited comeback to the GP2 top positions.

-credit: javiervilla.com

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