A tough weekend in Baku for Racing Engineering and the focus is already on Austria

25/06/17 A tough weekend in Baku for Racing Engineering and the focus is already on Austria.

Yesterday’s Feature Race at Baku was mixed for Racing Engineering with Louis Delétraz retiring after hitting a barrier on cold brakes resulting in him starting 17th while Gustav Malja was the innocent victim of another driver’s accident which caused the race to be red flagged after the track became blocked leaving the young Swede in 11th. Yet again the weather continued to be ideal for racing with air and track temperatures of 27° and 56° degrees respectively, higher than it had been in in the Feature Race. Both the Racing Engineering drivers were starting on the Pirelli P Zero White medium compound tyres for the twenty-one lap race, as were all the other drivers.

It was a disappointing opening lap for Gustav, losing places to Matsushita, Camara, Gelael and Ghiotto to finish the opening lap in 15th and on lap two he dropped a further position to Visoiu to start the third lap in 16th. Over the next few laps he held the gap to Visoiu to less than a second but by lap ten, approaching the halfway point, the gap had opened out to 2.4 seconds. However by lap fourteen the Racing Engineering car had closed in again on Visoiu who was involved in a tense battle with Camara, Canamasas and Gelael but on lap eighteen Gustav made contact with the barrier with his right, rear wheel which caused him to fall away from Visoiu and into the clutches of Fuoco and on lap twenty he lost the place to the Prema driver falling to 14th which was where he finished.

Louis held on to 17th place on the opening lap and he finished lap one a second behind Visoiu and 0.8 ahead of Fuoco and he was able to keep the Prema car behind him until lap five when the Italian got ahead. The young Swiss now came under pressure from the very experienced Cecotto and on lap nine he had to give way to the Rapax car to leave him in 17th following two retirements ahead of him. Louis was unable to gain any more positions and he finished the race in 17th place.

This was very much a weekend to forget for Racing Engineering with neither driver really on the pace and no points scored but they will spend the next two weeks working very hard to discover what went wrong and to ensure they are fully competitive again at the next round at Spielberg in Austria.

©FIA F2 Championship

©FIA F2 Championship

Team Comments:

Sebastien Viger, Technical Director: “A poor race today. The start itself was not so bad, but Gustav then lost a lot of positions during the first lap, dropping to 15th. From there on we tried to fight back and make up positions again. There was a lot of fighting going on the track today, we saw a few mistakes and heard complaints about the car, so we will have a deep look into what happened. He ended up hitting the wall, which damaged the car and from this moment on it was pretty much over. In Louis’ case, he never managed to show some pace, his DRS was not working, which was not helping. We have, for sure, a lot of work to do before the next race.”

Louis Delétraz: “Overall this is a weekend to forget with bad qualifying, a bad race 1 and bad race 2. We really need to work on improving now. We go back to Europe now, race on tracks I know, I am really looking forward to it and to good results and scoring points there.”

Gustav Malja: “Overall this was a really bad weekend here in Baku. I didn’t have the best start in today’s race, but still got off the line normally. But then I lost a lot of positions during the first lap as I tried to go around the outside, but couldn’t do it, so it was a wrong decision. After this I already felt on the first lap that the car was damaged in the suspension, the steering wheel was bent. I had to deal with this all race long and, because of this, the car was unstable. I still managed to stay in the pack and felt I was faster than the cars in front after getting used to driving the slightly damaged car. Then I committed a little mistake. I slowed down too much for the yellow flag for safety reasons and lost the DRS. It took me a lot of hard work to recover from this. When I finally did, I didn’t overtake, but was overtaken again. I then pushed and made a little mistake, touched the wall, which damaged the car even more. This allowed Fuoco to overtake as well and that was it. All in all, after qualifying it all went downhill unfortunately. I felt well up until to that, so we need to see what happened during that lap and what happened to the car. Then we will hit the reset button and focus on the Red Bull Ring.”