04.07.2003 (lil)

French Grand Prix - Qualifying
Magny - Cours (F) – July 4th 2003

For Coloni Motorsport, the qualifying session of the French Grand Prix (sixth race of the F.I.A. F.3000 International Championship) brought a very good outcome: in fact, the Italian team placed both his drivers, Ricardo Sperafico and Zsolt Baumgartner, in the first positions.

BMW-WilliamsF1 tester, Ricardo Sperafico, will line up on Sunday in the second row of the starting grid: the Brazilian set a time of 1.29.357, which was worth of the fourth position, despite the free practice hadn’t supplied useful information due to the changing weather conditions.

Zsolt Baumgartner instead scored a good 1.29.683, which will allows him to start from the ninth position: the JordanF1 tester showed to be immediately competitive on the French track, lapping very quickly with the first set of new tyres. Unfortunately Zsolt couldn’t fully exploit his second set, because of the traffic he had met, taking the ninth place.

The race start is scheduled on Saturday at 16,00 (Eurosport Live at 16,00).

Ricardo Sperafico, 4th , 1.29.357 : “I’m satisfied with this qualifying, I had only some little set up troubles that in any case will be fixed up before the race. We have the possibilities of fighting for the podium and for victory too; it will be very important to consider also the tyres wear and the weather”.

Zsolt Baumgartner, 9th , 1.29.683 : “I’m quite happy with this result: with the first set of new tyres I was immediately very quick and I scored an excellent time. Unluckily I couldn’t do almost anything with the second set, I met a lot of traffic. The car is good, on Sunday I will able to fight for the points”.

Paolo Coloni, Team Principal: “This was a good qualifying, we are satisfied with the results achieved by our drivers and we worked in sight of the race too. We can aspire to the podium and also to the victory”.

Magny-Cours – sixth round of the Championship – www.magnyf1.com
(Local Times, GMT +1)

Saturday July 5th – 16.00 Race (Eurosport Live 16.00)