Dino Zamparelli's GP3 Diary - Great Britain
The ART driver on a frustrating Silverstone which he feels was ruined by an unjust penalty for passing under red flags
Friday 11 July 2014 13:01, UK
Silverstone is one of my favourite circuits on the GP3 calendar – so it goes without saying that I was a little on the excited side.
There’s always a buzz for a British driver racing at Silverstone. It has that history, famous victories and battles in the past, and of course it has the crowd. Even for GP3, there were lots and lots of fans watching the sessions, which is always very nice. As a British driver, it gives you that bit of push and desire to do well.
Unfortunately for me, one small error cost me the chance to do well this weekend - and it was all looking so promising early on!
For the first and only time on the GP3 calendar, I was able to drive to the race circuit straight from my house! This is always fun; it means I can leave Thursday morning, drive up with the windows open, the music turned up loud, the sunnies on and generally enjoying the cruise down the A43 into Silverstone! It was a typical Thursday with a track walk and a briefing with the team. The Silverstone track is a bit of a longer walk than most, I think it’s actually only Spa that takes longer.
Friday Practice went very well. We started out on the soft tyres that we used in Austria – this is typically always the first tyre we start practice on. And then we’ll use a new set of whatever compound we’re using for that weekend. In this case, we were on the hard compounds for Silverstone. So we used softs to start with to get back into the circuit and to pick out the braking points and so on. Amazingly, the soft tyres went off after half a lap it seemed! It was like buying an ice cream and realising it was already melting when you took the wrapper off. It was pretty bad.
The soft tyres were kicking out the rear everywhere and I just had zero grip! So we came in and changed the tyres to the hard compound. I was able to put in a competitive lap time that saw me end the session in second place. I was feeling confident for qualifying in the morning.
In typical British fashion, it had rained overnight by the time qualifying was upon us on Saturday morning. You can’t have a British race without having some rain somewhere! It was a little bit annoying because I felt that we had a really strong car in the dry, and the wet makes it more of a gamble. Don’t get me wrong, I love driving in the wet and have always felt comfortable in the wet, but it’s a lot easier for someone to block you and generally easier to miss out on being fast in a wet session.
If we’re talking in terms of gambling, my horse came in at the last minute. Or in terms of roulette, my number came in on the last spin! It was pretty close in the end, but I managed to qualify in fourth place on my very last lap. Up to the chequered flag, I was languishing outside the top 20 - I just couldn’t get the balance on the first set of wet tyres. For me, it felt like I was driving a boat (maybe a boat would have been quicker). So I came in a bit earlier, made some positive tweaks to the car and went out on a fresh set of tyres. I managed to set a lap and it was quick enough for fourth. I was surprised it was so fast because I really wasn’t ready for it and was actually winding up to do another lap. But I got blocked and lost my second lap. And that was it.
Fourth was okay – I was fairly content with that seeing as it was a tricky session and there was a lot going on. However, I was stripped of fourth place almost immediately after being called up to the Stewards' Office. I would soon be demoted to ninth place for something that wasn’t my fault...at all.
I don’t want to go too deeply into what happened, because the incident has happened and I have my view on it, and the Stewards clearly took a different view of it. But basically, what happened was at the very beginning of the session, there was an awful lot of spray and thus an incident on the first lap promptly brought out the red flag. I was making my way slowly to the pits and as I came down the Stowe straight, I saw a number of cars slowing down to get passed the incident and all the debris.
I was ready to get in line and slowly go past the incident, when I looked in my rear-view mirror and see one of the Hilmer cars completely flat out, about to hit me at full speed. So as I’m approaching the slowing pack, I realise the guy behind is going to hit me, so I jump off my brakes and veer off to the right a bit. This allowed the guy more time to react and meant he would not slam into my back and cause a major pile-up. Great stuff, I saw him fly past everyone at 100 miles an hour and away, but he managed to slow down without hitting anyone. ‘Phew’, I thought, ‘that was a close shave’.
However, as a result of jumping off the brakes, I was now carrying more speed than I would have liked and was in danger of piling into the back of the cars ahead myself. I had no time left to slow down, and without knowing what else was behind me, I decided to go into the middle of the track, overtaking one of the cars to the right, and slowly and safely made my way back to the pits.
‘Five-place grid penalty for overtaking under red flag conditions...’
Can you believe that in order to save a pile-up and potentially ruining five or six cars’ session (including my own), I actually got penalised for doing exactly the right thing? As my team manager quite rightly put it, it’s a bit like being stopped at the traffic lights, waiting for the green light, then you look up in your mirrors and see a car about to slam into the back of your car. What do you do?
You release the clutch, go over the red light and pull into a safer place where you know you’re not going to get hit. Okay, you’ve technically broken the law, but you’ve done a really smart move and used the common sense and instinct to be safe. There you have it, that’s what scuppered my Race One.
Anyway, Race One I recovered and finished eighth. It was only a small amount of points, but it did mean I got reverse grid pole which was a good opportunity to turn the weekend around. I was still annoyed at that penalty, because with the whole grid not being able to overtake one another, I think we can safely assume that a podium or at the very least, a top-four placing was on the cards. Race One is where the big points are scored as well...
Race Two was a tale of two stories. The first story was that I messed up the start procedure – plain and simple. I made one mistake all weekend in my eyes, and it was the Race Two on pole. The one time all year that I got a poor start and it has cost me very dearly.
The other story was that I struggled massively with my car balance after my poor start, and was not able to hold onto my fifth place at the finish. I was involved in some battles with faster cars, and eventually lost out, crossing the line in seventh place. Frustrated is not the word I felt at the time! Frustrated and annoyed was a huge understatement!
In many ways, Race Two sort of summed up the whole weekend really - everything was looking very promising and looking like a great weekend at the start, and for one or two mishaps, the weekend just didn’t come together.
But you know in racing you really do have to take the rough with the smooth. There were many positive things that I could take out from this weekend. Our single-lap pace was up there and very competitive in both wet and dry conditions. We know we can improve our start procedure to make it more consistent and we know we have still some work to do, in order to get our race pace up there a little bit more. We’re not far away at all, but we’ve got work to do.
The next one is in Germany and we have back to back races coming up in it and then the Hungarian round. These are two tracks that I really enjoy and I can’t wait to get out there and make amends for a poor Silverstone...
DZ
Follow Dino on Twitter: @DinoZamparelli
