17 year old Indian racing sensation, Armaan Ebrahim blazed the new Sepang 2.6 km track during the Formula Renault Asia V6 official two day test in Malaysia on the 13th & 14th of April 2007.

Armaan who recently signed up with Team TARADTM settled down quite comfortably with the new team. The test was conducted on the shorter track in Sepang which is the proposed track configuration for Round 1 in May. The total track length is 2.6kms, which is fairly short for a powerful car such as the V6 Renault.

With track temperatures soaring well past 50 degrees centigrade, Armaan managed to do a time of 1 min: 00.75secs seconds Adderly Fong from Macau of Champ Car Racing who finished 3rd on debut last year was half a second slower and Marchy Lee of China, winner of the Formula BMW and Formula 3 Championships from Team Meritius was a further 0.2 secs away from the second slot.

On day 2, the Formula 3 Asian Champion, James Winslow from Great Britain pushed hard on new tyres to equal Armaan’s time the previous day. However, young Armaan managed to go past that time and set the fastest time of the weekend with a 1 min: 00.36 sec on tyres which were more than 30 laps old.

Commented Armaan : We were not really looking for flat out times and were concentrating more on getting some consistent lap times and also balancing the car on old tyres. It was more towards a race set up preparation that we were working on. Thus I was quite pleased that we managed to put in the fastest times on both days with old tyres which obviously tell us that there is a lot more to come on new tyres.

In addition, on day 2, I was getting used to the steel brakes instead of the carbon brakes that were being used last year. The steel brakes are spongier and the braking points cannot be as deep as compared to the carbon fiber brake discs.

All in all, it was a good test and I had a good time working with my engineer and my team. We are now prepared and ready for the season ahead of us and I am looking forward to a very competitive championship ahead.

I would once again like to thank my sponsors: JK Tyres, TARADTM, Amaron, Elf and Anand Cine for backing my participation in this series.