India's Formula 3 star Karun Chandhok had a weekend, which he described as being one where "everything that could go wrong, did" !
The drama for the weekend started during the Friday practice sessions when a fumbled gear change caused severe damage to the engine resulting in lost track time and a late night's work for the T-Sport crew in preparation for the qualifying sessions on Saturday. The first qualifying session went better for team and driver as Karun describes - "We haven't really been on top of things around here like we have been at Croft and Knockhill (the preceding 2 rounds where Chandhok was in the top 5). In first qualifying we were a bit closer to the pace and ended up only 3 tenths of pole position, but because it's such a competitive field, that was enough to just get us into the top 10." The second session didn't go as well, and although Karun was just over half a second off pole position, that left him down in 15th place.
On Saturday evening the abandoned race from Silverstone was run and after a great start, Karun moved up 4 places by the end of lap 3. As the pack headed down the back straight, Karun was being chased by then Championship leader, James Rossiter who made an over-ambitious lunge to try and pass, which resulted in the Indian being knocked down to the tail of the field. He recovered to finish behind old scholarship class rival, Ernesto Viso in 14th place.
Sunday's races proved to be a similar affair. In race 1, Karun made a good start to move alongside Danilo Dirani, but unfortunately the Brazilian F3 champion swerved to avoid another car and into Karun's path, breaking the Indian's front wing. Karun pulled into the pits to have the damage mended and rejoined just to do some setup work as his race was all but over. In race 2, Karun passed James Walker and Andrew Thompson and also got ahead of his ex-team mate Clivio Piccione when the Monegasque driver made a mistake. But once again, progress in the early laps would be curtailed by an incident when on lap 8, Thompson tried to pass the Madras born driver but his attempt resulted in the Scotsman running into the back of the Indian's car sending Karun off into the field.
At the end of the weekend, Chandhok who is backed by JK Tyre, Kingfisher, TATA, Madhouse, Ucal and Parx, said "I just cannot believe the amount of bad luck we've had this weekend. To have 3 collisions in 3 races is very bizarre and I don't think I've never had so much bad luck in one race weekend in my entire career ! We have to now sit down, regroup and make out our game-plan again. The team and I have been working our way towards the front over the last couple months and this weekend has been a bit of a set back. We have an important test session in Wales coming up this week and hopefully we can get back to making the progress that we were doing before coming here. I have great faith in the boys at T-Sport and as long as my sponsors can carry on the support that's required I do believe that we can get ourselves back in a position to run in the top 5 again."
