Team India disappoints in Friday's practice

SYDNEY, February 1: All the pre-event activities done with, it all boiled down to the home stretch. It was time for action, time for all the talk to stop and do the drive. It wasn't the ideal of starts to a GP weekend for A1 Team India going into round six, the second half of the A1GP, the World Cup of Motorsport.
With driver Parthiv Sureshwaran unable to make it to Sydney, the team was pushed to the backfoot in terms of crucial data as well as the set-up of the car.
And it being a totally new circuit, with Narain Karthikeyan having never raced at the 3.93km Eastern Creek Raceway in Blacktown, the motorsport capital of Australia, it was all the more difficult. Add to that a wet track due to overnight rain and a light drizzle, and it was an uphill task for A1 Team India.
But experience, they say, teaches you. Having encountered numerous weekends like this in his racing career, Narain will not throw in the towel yet. Like he said after a wet and overcast official practice session 2 on Friday, "Every driver on this grid wants to win... anything is possible."
The 30-year-old, who was 18th in practice out of 22, still reckons a good qualifying position doesn't look bleak despite the challenges. "The track is a bit of an eye opener. It is quite bumpy in Sector 1. The tyres wear off really quickly on this track. Unless you have previous experience of this track, you are bound to struggle. If you looked at the practice performance of the teams, almost everybody, including Germany, struggled whereas the guys who have done the circuit before and who were out in the morning session (for rookie drivers) banged it in later in the day," explained Narain.
"There are a lot of gaps in the tarmac and it puts a great load on the tyres and the car. It is paramount that there is good traction otherwise the tyres will get blistered. It is a hard-to-learn circuit because you take different lines each time to avoid the bumps. This in turn, degrades the tyres. You are not learning much actually," was how he put it.
Narain had a best time of 1:20.936s set in his fifth lap, +2.261s off A1 Team France, who topped the timesheets. The fact that Narain wanted to familiarise himself with the track can be gauged from the fact that he did the second most number of laps — 29, after A1 Team Pakistan, which did 33 laps. Narain shaved off couple of seconds each lap during his initial run but he didn't read too much into it.