Dubai: Andrea Piccini race report

In Spite of The Retirement, Andrea Piccini is Satisfied With The Lamborghini's Progress in Dubai.

Andrea Piccini and the Lamborghini Murcielago's debut on the Dubai circuit ended prematurely due to a gearbox problem that struck them at the 55th lap. Regardless of these inevitable problems that a car this young can have, the Lamborghini has shown encouraging improvement. For example: Andrea Piccini was able to set the third best time during the warm up today.

And not only; Andrea had a steady fast pace that allowed him to climb his way up from the 12th place on the grid to the 5thplace during his driving stint.Unfortunately to fix a few technical inconveniences, the duo Piccini & Deletraz lost almost 2 hours of the free practice session and were only able to do about 7 laps during the first hour of the qualifying session.

In spite of all of these mishaps, Andrea is satisfied with the car's progress, with the team's work and with the tyres.

Andrea Piccini

"We had a few technical problems till Thursday that influenced our performance. We weren't able to run continuously during the free practice session and we paid the price for that during the qualifying session. Moreover,the track conditions changed over 24 hours and this wasn't to our advantage. The car did improve km after km and had we been able to work in better conditions, we could have set a great time during the qualifications. To prove this we had the 3rd best time during the warm up and it was even better than what we did the day before. I started the race well. I slowly started conquering positions and climbed my way up to the 5th place. It's a pity that the broken gear box forced my team-mate Deletraz to retire.

Despite this, I'm very happy about the car's progress race after race. I'm sure that all of these reliability problems will be solved when we set up an intense test session.

The Dams Team, has worked night and day to find the best set up for the car and a great praise goes to Michelin as well. The tyres given to us worked well and were reliable all weekend. Regardless of the early retirement, we can imagine being one of the main protagonists of the next championship.

In fact these races represent in a way our first test sessions to develop the car and to help us prepare for the 2005 season.

-gpgroup-