March 05, 2002
DPI #1 driver, Dan Lawrence, has spoken about his fortunes in Australia.

I was pretty gutted with 11th place to be honest. I felt that, given my qualifying lap and knowing I could have gone faster still, I would have improved on my 9th place on the grid. Infact I was sure I would have improved.

My car was very quick on the opening laps, and I moved from 9th to 2nd by the end of lap 1. Turn 1 was very exciting! I managed to keep pace with the front runners until lap 4, and ta that point my tyres started to lose their 'feel', and I was no longer able to get the lap times I got at the start of the race. After another 5 laps though, the tyres came back [strangely] and I was able to lap incredibly consistently right up until my 1st pitstop. The 2nd stint was a virtual repeat of the 1st stint. I was very quick for the forst 4-5 laps, managing to lap up to 3 seconds faster than the cars in front of me, but as in the 1st stint, my tyre performance strangely disappeared. I am not sure if this is a characteristic of the Bridgestone tyres, but if it is I am very impressed, it enabled me to look after my tyres in effect and be able to banzai the laps in the buildup to my pitstops.

I mainly spent the race with the Jonks and the CVRT's, but unfortunately they managed a much greater result than myself. But, being 120bhp down on the top runners gives me some feeling of satisfaction, as I knew I could go much faster given the right equipment.

I am off to Spain in a few hours, where I will be testing for 4 days solid to improve the weakest aspects of our car....hopefully the fruits of this work will become apparent by the end of the season. In the meantime though, I am just going to knuckle down and bear it."

A strong rumour from another DPI source has suggested Paul Wallace, the teams #2, has been fired from his seat after failing to impress in Australia.