During the first day and a half of practice the damage was severe. After that the drivers learned that caution was required if a time was to be posted.

The track started to rut very quickly and when we got to qualifying, each round's Fastest time was slower than the previous round.  Just as well it was round points. This hole was on the racing line into the straight in front of the Driver's Stand. The picture on the right shows some of the crack that appeared, nor really a problem, unless you wanted to play cricket.

The Round Statistics tell the story of the track.

There we only two drivers who got 14 laps (the other was Kenji Osaka, from Japan driving a Mugen) and that was in Round 1. Note that Pavidis was in Heat 1 which was the first heat on the track in Round 1.

Timing
The meeting was timed with the new AMBrc Digital Transponder system. We used a "combat proven" bbk DRIVERS system for the Official Timing System and our latest Windows based Practice Management software to give us backup times. The backup system was decoding the full 7 digit transponder code, so we could distinguish between different sets of transponders. This was useful and prevented 2 cars running with number 7 transponder in one of the heats. There will be a full report on our experiences with the AMBrc at this meeting in a couple of weeks. 

We also had sector timing and a speed trap on the backup system. IFMAR have reservations about sector timing, so we did not publish this data during the racing. We stored the data and will publish some of it on the internet in due course. It was interesting to note that the fastest cars in the speed trap were not the cars with the fastest laps.

AMB it were represented by Dennis Roodhardt, who we have been working with all summer testing the new AMBrc system and the AMBrc Direct Powered Transponders. These were seen for the first time in their production form at this meeting.