01/04/2010
NEWS STORY
Status Grand Prix driver Robert Wickens produced an excellent performance to be third quickest in the GP3 Series pre-season 'qualifying' at the Paul Ricard HTTT circuit today, a session which dictated the car number allocation to each team for the season ahead.
The half-hour session was designed to replicate qualifying conditions for the Formula One support series, and ended with Wickens third fastest just behind the ART Grand Prix duo of Alexander Rossi and Esteban Gutierrez, thereby ranking Status GP as the second of the 10 teams. The team's three cars will therefore carry numbers 4, 5 and 6 during 2010.
The Canadian then went even better in the final afternoon session of the test, matching the time of second-placed Gutierrez, and just 0.09s off the benchmark time by Rossi.
Lebanese driver Daniel Morad backed up his strong top 6 performance on the first day of the test by being a consistent top 10 runner all day. A throttle problem constricted his speed during the qualifying session, however, and then in the afternoon - despite having the fastest Sector 1 time for much of the session - an oil pressure problem struck before he could set a time on fresh rubber leaving him just outside the Top 10 in 11th.
Marussia Motors development driver Ivan Lukashevich continued to find improvements throughout the day, and the Russian teenager closed another second to the ultimate pace while completing over 70 laps during the day.
Status GP team manager, Simon Cayzer: "Obviously we're pleased to have secured the position as the second quickest team in the pre-season qualifying - it's a testament to development and feedback of our drivers and the hard work of the all team. ART are established a very strong team, and to be challenging them at this stage is encouraging."
Daniel Morad: "We worked through some good fine tuning in the morning, despite a sticking throttle. In the afternoon we showed good pace on old tyres, but a technical problem just before the new tyre run cut us short - it's a shame not to show my full speed, but with the engineering team around me I know how strong we really are."
Ivan Lukashevich: "The mileage we got is very good, trying many different set-ups - we've got through a lot of that today and we're making good progress each and every time in the car. My race engineer Rob (Arnott) is very pleased with that side of things, so I'm encouraged."
Robert Wickens: "The day went pretty well - we started going through our in depth development programme before we had some issues. We got it fixed for the 30-minute time trial - we treated it like any other session to develop the car, so to finish P3 was a nice reward."