France wins feature race; Jos 16th in Sepang
Published on 21 November 2005 by Thorsten Hendriks
We can't say this weekend's race in Malaysia wasn't a good one. Bad luck for Jos Verstappen; no safety car situations with which he good make good stalling his car at the start. An excellent race with lots of fights for position. Malaysia showed what Hermann Tilke had in mind for this circuit when he designed it.
Jos: "I'm gutted. Same problem as in Estoril. You try to start with as little wheelspin as possible but you don't want your engine to stall so you try it with a sipping clutch. Right against the rpm-limiter. That is very sensitive and if you make a little mistake it stalls the car. We will have to have a look how we can prevent this in future. The only good thing is that I had the fastest lap."
Not a good result for Jos who had to settle for 16th place. Bad luck at the start and the pitstop had some hickups. Without race interruptions it is not possible to gain places.
The race:
Japan didn't get away from the grid during the formation lap and needed to have his car restarted. No other problems and all cars lined up on the grid. Jos however stalled his car (as well as Brazil) and stood there while the whole field passed left and right.
It was again an action-packed race with the first casualty being A1 Team China when their A1 race car rolled several times after contact with Portugal on lap two. Luckily Tengyi Jiang was soon out of the car that landed on its wheels and A1 Team Portugal was able to continue after visiting the pits for repairs.
Soon after this it was India and Pakistan who collided with Armaan Ebrahim running into the back of the car driven by Adam Khan. India continued in the race although it was eventually excluded after receiving a push start from the marshals while Pakistan never made it back to the pits.
Battles down the field were fast and furious with Mexico and Australia driving side by side on lap eight while contesting fourteenth position. Two teams who had an awful lot of hard work to do were A1 Teams Netherlands and Brazil who both failed to get away from the grid with the other cars. Nelson Piquet Jr was particularly lucky as cars swerved around him on the grid but he soon started to make his way up the field and scored a point for his team.
Italy, USA, Canada and the Czech Republic were also doing battle and for several laps the four were only separated by 1.5 seconds. The pit stops came relatively late in the race with A1 Team France waiting until the end of lap 16. Until that point the order at the top had been France, Switzerland and Great Britain but of these three, only France managed a trouble-free pit stop. Theirs took just 40.5 seconds while for A1 Team GBR it was problems both getting the wheel off and putting the wheel nut on that kept them there for nearly two minutes. When the car lost all its drive a short while later it was all over for the British team. The Swiss stop at the end of lap 18 was 53.11 seconds.
Mexico was the last of the teams to pit and therefore its top three position as the race drew to a close was unrepresentative. At the end of lap 28, they came in from fourth and dropped down to sixteenth. The other late stopper was A1 Team Netherlands with their stop at the end of lap 26 when lying in eleventh place.
A1 Team Canada was on for a top six finish but when Sean McIntosh decided to try an overtaking manoeuvre for fifth on lap 22 that was the of the end of his race as he clipped the rear of Enrico Toccacelo's Italian car and afterwards accepted total responsibility for an error in judgement.
The final result is: France wins dominantly, Switzerland second again and third is for Czechia.
TEAM LAPS TIME DIFFERENCE
1 FRANCE 30 1:00:06.495 -
2 SWITZERLAND 30 1:00:11.051 +4.556
3 CZECH REP. 30 1:00:22.184 +15.689
4 ITALY 30 1:00:30.233 +23.738
5 MALAYSIA 30 1:00:38.136 +31.641
6 NEW ZEALAND 30 1:00:39.192 +32.697
7 USA 30 1:00:39.832 +33.337
8 GERMANY 30 1:00:41.876 +35.381
9 IRELAND 30 1:00:42.240 +35.745
10 BRAZIL 30 1:00:45.883 +39.388
11 AUSTRALIA 30 1:00:56.978 +50.483
12 SOUTH AFR. 30 1:00:58.334 +51.839
13 JAPAN 30 1:01:04.243 +57.748
14 INDONESIA 30 1:01:11.734 +1'05.239
15 MEXICO 30 1:01:28.935 +1'22.440
16 NETHERLANDS 30 1:01:53.803 +1'47.308
17 LEBANON 29 1:00:25.415 1 Lap
18 PORTUGAL 29 1:01:11.172 1 Lap
19 CANADA 21 42:33.401 9 Laps
20 GREAT BRIT. 20 42:46.699 10 Laps
21 AUSTRIA 17 34:13.424 13 Laps
22 INDIA 11 25:14.695 19 Laps
23 PAKISTAN 4 8:12.600 26 Laps
24 CHINA 1 2:17.142 29 Laps
Thorsten Hendriks
