A1GP news

New Zealand tops first day at Silverstone

A1 Team New Zealand showed it will be a force to be reckoned with this season with the fastest time ever recorded around the Silverstone National circuit in testing today.

Jonny Reid set a 48.102-second lap towards the end of the first day of the official one-and-a-half day test at Silverstone this week.

It was the fastest time set around the Silverstone's 2.68km layout by an A1GP car, beating the time of 48.182s set by A1 Team France's Alexandre Premat in August 2005.

Reid was happy with his lap. 'When we put it all together at the end of the day it was a good lap,' he said. 'There is still a little bit of time to come so we will try similar things again tomorrow and we will be up there to try and better it.'

If anything, today's test showed how competitive A1GP is likely to be this season. The entire field was covered by just 2.1 seconds, with the top 17 runners all lapping within a second of each other.

Narain Karthikeyan put in a strong lap with the second fastest time of the day for A1 Team India, which was another team to put in its best performance towards the end of the day.

Karthikeyan's time was perhaps more impressive considering the team is playing catch-up to the rest of the field having lost a day's testing at last month's official test, when the 30-year-old was advised to go home and rest after suffering a fever.

'We tried a lot of things, and kept improving the car throughout the day,' Karthikeyan said. 'We still need to find a bit of time but I think we are going in the right direction.'

A1 Team Netherlands built up to its home race next weekend with the third quickest time. Jeroen Bleekemolen set the time this morning and reckons the team have made considerable progress since the first Silverstone test last month.

'We tried something with set-up this afternoon that didn't work,' he said, 'but what we tried this morning did. We are really happy with car and we've got so much better with it.'

Loic Duval was fourth quickest for 2005/06 champion A1 Team France, with his time also set this morning.

But it was A1 Team China provided perhaps the biggest surprise of the day with the fifth quickest time. Unveiling a new livery, Congfu Cheng was fifth quickest, just three tenths of a second of Reid's pace-setting lap.

'It was a bit unfortunate that I didn't do a perfect lap on the new tyres but in the end I think it is a good improvement from China,' said Cheng.

Oliver Jarvis was behind the wheel of the Great Britain car, preparing for Zandvoort next weekend. Team-mate Robbie Kerr, who will race in the second round at Brno, will drive tomorrow.

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