8TH ROW FOR ONIDI, COLETTI TO START FROM P22

Fabio Onidi and Stefano Coletti will start respectively from P16 and P22 on the grid in the first race of the GP2 Bahrain weekend.On a circuit that is renowned for being very aggressive on tyres, the team decided that the priority for today was to save as much Pirelli rubber as possible for the races, even knowing that this would have proved an handicap in Qualifying. As both drivers were at their first outing on the Grand Prix layout of the Sakhir track the first 30’ of Free Practice today were devoted to learning the track, while in the afternoon both Coletti and Onidi tackled Qualifying with just one set of tyres.

With just one shot at a quick lap there wasn’t any room for bad luck or mistakes, and Scuderia Coloni’s qualifying saw a bit of both. Onidi’s pace was good, but he did a mistake in his quickest lap and had to settle for an eight row start (16th place), while Coletti was forced to waste the quickest laps of his tyres in the traffic. Stefano found a clear lap only when his Pirellis were too worn, and so he ended the session in P22.

Paolo Coloni: “We knew that our choice to save tyres would have made qualifying difficult, but in the end we paid for that a bit more than we were expecting. It’s pity because we had the potential to do better even with just a few laps at our disposal, but anyway we are confident for tomorrow. With fresh tyres and a good pit-stop strategy it’s still possible to bring both cars in the top ten, and this will be our aim”.