Saturday, 22nd March 2008 : Armaan Ebrahim put in a spirited drive in the wet to move up from 25th on the grid to 8th place on race day one of the GP 2 Asia series being held at the Sepang Circuit in Malaysia today. However with just 5 laps to go, there was a collision, when Karun Chandhok who was behind Armaan, out braked himself in the wet side of the track and the 2 cars were out of the race.

An 8th place finish would have had Armaan starting from Pole in the sprint race as the grid is reversed for Sprint Race for positions 1 to 8 , but his luck deserted him at the crucial time. Armaan starts 14th in tomorrow’s sprint race.

Commented Armaan: It was extremely difficult in the practice and qualifying trying to get the right balance and also the right braking technique. All the drivers were fresh from 6 days of testing in France in the new GP2 car, whereas I missed all the tests due to lack of budgets. This sure proved to be a handicap as all of them were on the pace straight away.

However, when the heavens opened up just before the start of the race, a lot of this got neutralized. I moved up to 10th place and was holding my position quite comfortably. I made two more places after the pit stop, when we changed over to slicks as the track was drying out very fast. I made a big mistake on the first lap after my pit stop, where I lost 6 seconds. This got Karun behind my gearbox very quickly. The incident was a racing incident as once he was on the wet side of the track, when he tried to outbrake me, he had no control over his car and we collided, ending both our races. It is frustrating as I knew there just 5 laps to go and by finishing 8th, I would be starting on Pole tomorrow.

However, this is part of racing and hopefully if we have a wet race tommorrow, I can look forward to a positive top 10 finish.

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