A1GP news

Dutch clinch fifth with consistent final race

With a sixth place in the A1GP Sprintrace and a fifth place in the Feature race at Brands Hatch A1 Team Netherlands has managed to clinch fifth place in the Championship. During the final A1GP of this season the team managed to pass Malaysia.

Afterwards Jeroen Bleekemolen was not pleased with the race result, a podium had certainly been possible according to the A1 Team Netherlands driver, "We can be quite pleased with fifth in the Championship. That is where we do belong as far as our pace goes. But I am not completely happy, you always compete to win. Getting a seat in the car at the very last moment, I completely did not know how it was going to end up though. The latter half of the season we have been there quite a number of times, we should have certainly have finished on the podium a few times and could have won more races. Fifth is not bad at all, but you always hope for more. Fifth in the race today just was a shame, maybe we did not have the outright pace, but everything went very smooth. A very fast stop and after that there was the strange situation with Italy and the safety car. That was not fair, they should not have been driving there. Then we would have been in third, now we were fourth behind Italy. I tried to overtake Italy and was next to him but then I was cut off by Indonesia which wanted to go in. This made me lose two places, to Italy and also India. We had two possibilities to finish third and twice it did not go our way. Very bad to miss out on the podium again, we have had that quite a bit this season." 

According to Jan Lammers the team was on the right strategy for a podium finish today, "We had the pace and the strategy to finish on the podium. With pace I mean whether or not others are able to overtake you, which I don't think would have been possible. That was good. There are a few matters of doubt though which might still be rectified and then we will move up one more place. These are right on the edge. I hope that they will undertake steps toward Italy, that just was not right in our opinion. When you look at the Championship this is a just and fair result with Germany, New Zealand, Great Britain and France in front of us. We have had a good and solid season".

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