A1 Team Ireland is struggling to explain why it languished in a surprising 22nd and last place in free practice at Eastern Creek, Australia.
The team currently lies seventh in the championship standings and has been enjoying a consistent season, yet Adam Carroll was more than three seconds behind Loic Duval’s pace, and could not explain why.
‘We really have to look into this,’ Carroll said on www.a1gp.com.
‘We can’t explain it. We were very confident after Taupo and we showed really good pace over that weekend. So we were expecting to run strongly here.
‘We made some huge changes in the session just to see what would happen and it didn’t really make a difference to our performance.
‘We found a crack in the tub of the chassis and we’re a bit baffled by it. It was repaired but it could be part of the reason. But we are ridiculously so far off the pace.
‘Something has gone wrong – I haven’t forgotten how to drive.'
The team’s race engineer Dan Walmsley said they would now be looking at ways of solving the problem overnight before free practice resumes on Saturday.
‘Having looked at the chassis of the car we’ve established there is a crack in the tub which we believe is compromising the performance,’ Walmsley said.
‘We’re now looking at changing it for tomorrow to hopefully secure some better results. We ran a known good set up of ours but we were still three seconds off the pace.
‘The team will be working very hard into the night to turn our fortunes around for tomorrow.’
