Adrian Sutil left Melbourne after a disappointing debut into Formula 1 when a handful of rookie mistakes saw him finishing last out of the 17 who made it to race distance. Sutil made a good start but dropped to the rear of the field when he tangled with Anthony Davidson’s Super Aguri car at the first corener. He fought hard, closing in on the rest of the pack, but picked up a drive-through penalty for failing to observe waved blue flags. He then picked up a second drive-through penalty when crossing the white line at the end of the pit lane.
“When I did get some free space, I found I could push the car and was running similar times to the group in front, but I was disappointed to have the two drive-through penalties in the middle of the race,” Sutil explained morosely, “I guess it’s down to experience and I can only get better.”
Mike Gascoyne is putting a brave face on. “Our target for the race was to get two cars to the finish and, obviously, we didn’t make that,” he said. “However, Adrian set some competitive lap times, but made a couple of errors that earned him penalties, which dropped him back into traffic. Then the gap was too much to make up. Fortunately, you only do your first race once and, now he’s got all his rookie mistakes out of the way, we look forward to Malaysia, where we’ll be making some significant aero updates and hope we can be much more competitive.”
