A1GP news

Lyons: 'Testing programme is key'

Richard Lyons believes getting the off-season testing programme right will be critical to A1 Team Ireland's performances next season.

Ireland received a new chassis before the penultimate meeting of the season in Shanghai, China and Lyons recorded his best result of the season with fifth in the Feature race. However, that proved something of a false dawn, because the team failed to score any points in the next meeting at Brands Hatch.

Lyons, who raced the bright green car in 14 races this season, reckons that a careful, well thought-out testing schedule could help Ireland rediscover its 2005/06 season form, where they finished eighth in the championship. They finished 19th this season.

Lyons said: "If you look at the lap times at the end of Brands Hatch, say compared with A1 Team Italy, who finished third, basically we were running the same lap times. Our race pace is quite strong but we've just a problem with the set-up at the moment. We don't really have a base point."

Teams will take part in a two-day official test at Silverstone on 28-29 August, but can organise an additional one-day shoot-out session for rookie drivers if they wish.

"Since we changed the car we haven't had any time to work on it," Lyons added. 'What we need to do is go away for the couple of test days and start from scratch, work with the car, work through some base programmes and come back with the base set-up. "Because of time, at Brands Hatch we were throwing every single spring and every single roll bar on the car in one go."

The 27-year-old, a former Japanese Formula Nippon champion, hopes to return to the squad for the third season of the World Cup of Motorsport. He said: "I don't think Ireland could have had a better racing driver than what I've done in the last few weekends. If they put somebody else in fair play to them, but of course I want to be involved.

"I've started something here. I feel that I've been robbed a few times now of good results where we should have been better and I just hope that we can build on this and learn for the future."

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