Armaan @ GP2 Asia
Bad Luck makes Armaan’s GP2 debut a tough outing

The GP2 Asia Series debut races were held on 25th & 26th January 2008 at Dubai in which both Karun Chandhok and Armaan Ebrahim took part. While Karun had a successful outing with a podium finish, disaster struck on day 1 itself for Armaan who had to miss the first two days of testing which proved to be really crucial to making a good start to his GP2 debut. Four days of testing in Dubai before the race was enough to get Armaan in a confident mood to put in a good showing in his first race with the target being to finish in the top 15.

However, his car developed overheating problems on lap 1 of the first days test itself and despite the team making frantic efforts to change the engine and get rid of the problem, this could finally be solved only on day 3. Armaan had no choice but to sit and watch the rest of the 25 drivers getting used to the track and the car in the first two days of test.

On day 3, which was Armaan’s first day of testing, the 18 year old driver did a fantastic job. At the end of the day, Armaan clocked a time of 1 min 23.3 secs on his first new tyre run, which was only 1.5 secs of the quickest time posted for the day.

On day 4 the team sent Armaan out on a heavy fuel load to get used to the car for the main race consisting of 42 laps. Armaan again posted a good time of 1 min 24.9 secs on a heavy fuel load which was within a second of the quickest cars on a similar fuel load. The team and driver were all fired up to further improve on the time in the post afternoon session when Armaan was slated to do his final new tyre run with a light fuel load. But once again, his ill luck came into play as the exhaust pipe cracked on lap 1, thus ending his test session for the whole afternoon. All in all, Armaan got exactly 1 ½ days of testing as compared to the 4 days that every one else had.

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