By Ian Lockwood
April 22 2005

As the barman said to the horse when it walked into the bar, “Why the long face?” Yes, there were plenty of long faces in the Red Bull Racing camp this afternoon in Imola. Although all three cars ran trouble free through both sessions, they were just plain slow.

At the end of the day, David was 16th, Christian 19th and Tonio 21st, not exactly what the doctor ordered for the Italian’s F1 race debut.

But, to use a cliché, tomorrow is another day and there are still another 90 minutes of free practice on Saturday morning to try and get to the bottom of the problem, before the first qualifying session. At least all three drivers did plenty of laps, so the engineers will have loads of data to study to try and move their guys up the order.

It was a beautifully sunny but cool day at the Imola track for the first Formula 1 laps of the season in Europe and Spain’s Pedro de la Rosa was quickest in both sessions. The McLaren man is filling the role of third driver for the team, which surprised many pundits, after his strong drive to fifth place in Bahrain, when he stood in for the injured Montoya. The Colombian’s shoulder has still not heeled, which means that Alex Wurz is racing again for the first time since Malaysia in 2000.

Jenson Button was second quickest for BAR, followed by the McLaren of Kimi Raikkonen. The rest of the top six is made up of the Toyota of Ricardo Zonta, followed by the winner of the last two races, Fernando Alonso in the Renault and Michael Schumacher in the Ferrari.

Everyone talks about this being a home race for Ferrari, but in fact the team with the closest factory to the Imola circuit is the little Minardi outfit, which is based just a few kilometres away in Faenza. Fitting therefore that they chose this event to introduce their new 2005 car.

David Coulthard:
Chassis Number: 2
Best Time 1st Session: 1:24.126, Laps: 8
Best Time 2nd Session: 1:23.815, Laps: 20

“We did a normal race programme working on tyre choice and on what should be done on race fuels. This obviously gives us an indication on where we are in comparison to the quickest cars and what the true picture is. But the car does not feel too bad here - it just isn’t that quick!”

Tonio Liuzzi:
Chassis Number: 1
Best Time 1st Session: 1:24.052, Laps: 22
Best Time 2nd Session: 1:24.626, Laps: 29

“Today went quite well. It was important to make as many laps of the track and we did plenty, working on the tyre choice for tomorrow. We finished our full programme which was pretty good, but it is hard to compare our performance as, on Fridays, you never know what fuel loads the others are running, so  we have to wait for tomorrow.”

Christian Klien:
Chassis Number: 3
Best Time 1st Session: 1:22.736, Laps: 20
Best Time 2nd Session: 1:24.320, Laps: 38

“In the second session I did two long runs, the first one was 15 laps the second one 18 laps. I tested both tyre types and it seems that we are a bit further away from the top than usual and we seem to have lost out a bit to the other teams but the car feels ok.”

Günther Steiner, Technical Director:

“Today’s session was okay overall. We did everything we wanted to do, but it is hard to draw any conclusion. Basically the problem is that we are too slow. At the moment we have to think what we want to do for tomorrow to improve. We changed the aero balance and Christian tested the different damper and tyre specifications. David worked on balance and aero changes as well as the mechanical set-up. Tonio also worked on tyre choice.”

Source: Red Bull racing