Rough qualifying run in Queensland
4/7/2004 11:48 (Press Release) -
Ford Performance Racing (FPR) drivers Craig Lowndes and Glenn Seton have qualified 27th and 26th for tomorrow's 6th Round of the 2004 Australian V8 Supercar Championship Series at Queensland Raceway.
These disappointing results were due to a number of high and low speed set-up issues that have troubled Lowndes' CAT FPR Falcon and Seton's Ford Credit FPV Falcon during the opening Queensland practice sessions. Both FPR Falcons ran reliably throughout qualifying, the team performing a number of set up changes to try and improve both drivers' speed during the hectic 20 minute session.
Holden driver Jason Bright set the fastest lap of the qualifying session (1:10.2957s) was less than one tenth of a second ahead of Ford drivers Marcos Ambrose and Russell Ingall. The top 26 V8 Supercar drivers were separated by less than one second in qualifying, truly emphasising the competitiveness of this mid-season round.
The top ten Shootout saw Ambrose climb to Pole position ahead of HRT drivers Mark Skaife and Todd Kelly.
#5 Glenn Seton - "I was not happy with the car at all today. We have a major inbalance that affected power down traction and turning - it is a very hard car to get any speed out of at the moment. We have a lot of work to do to improve it for tomorrow and we will be making every effort to have a much better balanced car for the race."
#6 Craig Lowndes - "We are still suffering from our high speed understeer problems and we don't have the right balance for the car in the slow corners, particularly turns 3 and 6. Having said this, we should have done a better job as the car was better than what our fastest lap today displayed. I had a gearbox problem during the session as well, the gearstick kept jumping out of 4th gear through turns 1 and 2, so I had to hold it in at those corners. We have a lot of work to do tonight to develop a stronger set up that we will try out during the warm up."
FPR Chief Engineer, John Russell - "Our cars ran reliably today but we are simply not fast enough."
FPR is back on the track at 10:00am tomorrow for the 20 minute warm up with Lowndes and Seton lining up for Sunday's 280 kilometre / 90 lap race at 1:45pm.
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