Formula One News » No fairytale 300th F1 race for Barrichello Posted on 03/09/2010
Williams man Rubens Barrichello is already looking to Monza after his 300th F1 race at Spa-Francorchamps ended before it had really begun.
Barrichello qualified well for last Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix and for the fourth time in five races made it into the top-ten shoot-out, before eventually securing P7 on the grid, just behind Felipe Massa.
However on the opening lap it all went wrong under braking for turn 18, when he hit a wet patch of track and lost control of his Williams FW32 before slamming hard into the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso. He was unable to continued and retired on the spot, unable to complete a single race lap.
“Despite all my experience, it was very difficult to know how wet the track was on the opening lap, but it was fully wet when I came into Blanchimont,” Barrichello recalled. “I was closing the door on Nico Rosberg and when I touched the brakes, even though it was quite early, it wasn’t sufficient to stop the car.
“The car went straight on into Alonso, for which I’m sorry. It’s sad for the team. We’ve had such a positive weekend that a good result would have been a nice conclusion. Despite not having a good outcome in my 300th race though, I’m confident we will go well in the 301st!”
Nico Hulkenberg meanwhile also had a dismal race in the sister Williams FW30, and while he had also made it into Q3 and qualified tenth, he finished a lowly 14th, after a loss of full throttle control trigged a series of difficult pit stops and made controlling the car even more challenging in the changeable conditions.
“Pretty early on in the race I had a throttle control problem which made the car very difficult to handle, so we made an unscheduled stop, but the engine died in the box and had to be re-started,” Hulkenberg explained.
“As a result I dropped position and then had to cope in the rain without the full engine control, which caused some spins. We took some tyre gambles at the end to try and recover something [but by then it was all a bit late].”
“Today was not a good day with Rubens out on the first lap and Nico had a control system problem that compromised the driveability and caused the engine to cut in his pitstop,” added technical director, Sam Michael.
“So we are looking forward now. Our pace is improving and we will perform better in the forthcoming races,” he summed-up.
Follow us on twitter
Follow us on facebook
Subscribe to rss news feed