Gascoyne takes a go at Dennis!

By role
March 28 2003

In an interview with Autosport Gascoyne expressed that part of the great early form that Renault is showing is thanks to the valuable track time they have available on Friday Private Practice.

Renault was one of four teams that took the option of testing on Friday and have their in season test time reduced to 10 days or 20 days with a single car. This decision was highly criticized at the moment as none of the other top teams have decided to follow suit.

In the mentioned interview Gascoyne declared:

“McLaren ran this tyre in Jerez. Ron said we're the track cleaners for him, but basically he's our two-car tyre test team, and tyre testing costs a lot more than track cleaning does!”

He also mentioned that Friday Private Testing has proven more valuable than originally thought:

“It's more valuable than we thought. We'd made our tyre choice by Friday morning. In Melbourne there were a lot of different tyres – Michelin brought five – but here everyone's got predominantly the same tyres. The softer tyre, which we hadn't done a lot of running on, was from the Jerez test last week. We did a clear back to back, it was quicker, and for us it was very consistent. So we had no worries. So from the long runs we did on Friday morning, we decided the tyre was fine. I think some of the others have had to take the harder tyre. Our chassis doesn't use up its tyres.”

“I think they (the other teams) struggled to get a balance on it, whereas we did 40 extra laps with each driver, and if you count the total number of laps people have done, that's a helluva lot. I think we've attacked that session properly, three cars, experienced test driver, and we've maximised everything from it. But we've been top six all weekend, and we were top six or eight all through Melbourne, and we got qualifying wrong. We expected to be top six here, but both our drivers did mega laps. If you watch it back, you'll see Rubens make a little mistake, Raikkonen make a mistake… Our two guys didn't. I think the pace of the car is probably second or third row, but they pulled it out of the bag.”

You can read the whole interview at www.autosport.com