A weekend to forget 23.08.2009: When things are not meant to be, there is nothing one can do. And this is precisely what happened to the Fat Burner Racing Engineering Team this weekend at the Valencia Street Circuit.

When things are not meant to be, there is nothing one can do. And this is precisely what happened to the Fat Burner Racing Engineering Team this weekend at the Valencia Street Circuit.

The weekend in Valencia will be one to forget as soon as possible for the Fat Burner Racing Engineering Team after suffering the worst possible outcome of both races. After the great performance by Lucas Di Grassi and Dani Clos on Friday's qualifying session, the races did not go according to plan for either of them.  After their retirements during Saturday’s race, Lucas and Dani were involved in accidents during Sunday’s race and were not able to cross the finish line.

On Sunday's sprint race, Lucas had to say goodbye to any chance of getting closer to the first place in the driver standings when approaching the second corner, as he missed his braking point and crashed into Van der Garde. Although the Brazilian shortly before avoided a spinning Zuber just in front of him, his race was over only one corner later, where his heavily damaged car came to a halt. Lucas got out of his car and had to watch the race, which was rich in incidents resulting in three interventions from the safety car, as a spectator.

Teammate Dani Clos was able to keep himself out of trouble during the opening laps and pushed hard to move up to 11th position by lap 5. Having started second to last, the young Spaniard saw his chance to pass Chandhok and move up to 10th, but he drove over the dirty side of the track and went wide, dropping back to 13th place. When another driver crashed into the back of Dani’s car in lap 11, the rear wing came loose and it became too dangerous to continue the race. Dani had to retire to the pits on lap 13.


Lucas Di Grassi: Yesterday’s gearbox and hydraulic pump problem was discovered and I would first of all like to thank the entire team for having fixed it. They worked all night, didn’t get any sleep, repairing this mechanical failure out of the team’s control.

The guys did an awesome job. As for the race, I had a good start passing several cars, but at the braking point of the second turn, I lost my reference point when Zuber spun in front of me. I braked too late and am sorry about the result but couldn’t avoid it. We will be back in Spa in a week, and although the championship is getting difficult, we will fight to win every race from now to the end of the season.



Dani Clos: I had an amazing start and everything went really well during the fist laps. I moved up to 11th, which is fantastic, if you keep in mind that I started from the back. When I tried to pass Chandhok, I came onto the dirty side of the track and it was just like driving on ice. I went wide and lost some positions. I rejoined and wanted to recuperate positions, but another driver drove into the back of my car.

It wasn’t possible to continue due to security reasons and I had to stop.  It was actually not changing the performance of the car so much, but it was simply not safe. The weekend started really well with qualifying, and we will attack in Spa. We now have to only bring the good qualifying and race performance together.


Alfonso de Orleáns-Borbón, Team Principal: Good work from our boys, who put two fast cars on track after working all night. But what started well on Friday ended up as a black weekend. Nothing else to say.


- Racing Engineering  - photos GP2