APRIL 24, 2005

Carroll singing

The GP2 series had its second race on Sunday morning with the top eight finishers on Saturday starting in reverse order for the event. This gave Nicolas Todt's ART team 1-2 on the grid. During the night GP2 had decided to change the brake supplier and so there were fears before the event that the brakes would once again be a problem and this turned out to be the case for Rosberg who seemed to run out of brakes after 10 laps and was swallowed up by his team mate Alexandre Premat and Adam Carroll (Super Nova). The Ulsterman duly took the lead when the Frenchman overcooked it at the final corner. Carroll then took off into the lead, leaving Premat being chased by Neel Jani (Racing Engineering), who was obviously slower than the cars that were stacked up behind him. Jani twice ran across the final corner and gained an advantage on both occasions but was not punished.

Jose Maria Lopez got over-excited and spun off while battling in the queue. Eventually Jani picked up a puncture and went off and so Kovalainen was left to chase Premat, with Gianmaria Bruni, Olivier Pla and Nelson Piquet Jr on his tail. Nelson Jr then overcooked it and went off at Rivazza and blew his chance of making more places.

Carroll duly won the race ahead of Premat and Kovalainen. Reliability remained a problem with only 15 cars finishing the 17 lap race.

The budgets for the new series are nearly twice those of last year's Formula 3000 and there is clearly work to be done but the biggest problem appears to be that the format would be better suited to circus performers than to serious racing teams.