SILVERSTONE ROUND - REDWOOD AND FOSTER UNLUCKY IN THEIR VIPER DEBUT | 14.08.07 Team RPM finished building the teams 3rd new Viper for Redwood and Foster 02:00 Friday morning. The car rolled out on Friday for its first run. As expected Redwood and Foster had to run the car in all day Friday, not going above 4,000rpm so the test session did not give the pair any opportunity to work on setup. Then in Saturday’s testing the cars clutch failed after 20 minutes, a problem which could not be sorted in time for qualifying, meaning the duo could only qualify 22nd, and this was using only one gear! In the 2 hour race, Redwood started the race, and the first few race laps was the first time Redwood could open the car up. It quickly became apparent that without any development, the car was quick out of the box and Redwood had made it up to 7th from 22nd before pitting on the hour mark to hand over to Foster.   However, a failure in the re-fuelling system, saw the duo lose 10 minutes in the pits putting them out of contention. A non return value had broken on the car, meaning that when the fuel was dumped in, it ran out of the overflow pipe and the stewards would not let the car leave the pits until the valve was repaired. Redwood commented "The problem in the pits was a great shame, and nothing the team or drivers could have expected. When Nick got out on track, he was very much on pace and as quick as me, I think we would have been on for a great top 5 result had the 10 minutes not have been dropped in the pits."     Both Redwood and Foster showed very good pace, considering they had never even sat in a Viper until this weekend. With some testing, the duo are confident that their pace can improve further and are very optimistic for the remaining three rounds of the championship. - ends - << back to news