By Huw Alban
April 29 2002

OrangeArrows will no doubt be hoping that the Malaysian Grand Prix 2002 goes the same way, if not better than the 2001 race. Jos Verstappen made the most of a 1st corner clash and retirements to work his way up to 2nd place during the race, but a late pit stop resulted in a 7th placed finish. Rain, and a gamble by the OrangeArrows team played into Jos Verstappen's hands in 2001. Starting from 18th on the grid the team had to hope for unusual conditions, and these started when Ralf Schumacher was helped into a 1st corner spin causing the rest of the field to bunch up. Verstappen played it smart and ducked down the inside of the 1st corner, and emerged at the end of lap 1 in 6th.

From there a combination of gritty driving, a monsoon shower on lap 5 which the team had gambled on, and a number of retirements promoted the Dutchman as high as 2nd but evened out to 4th position by the time he was ready for his last pitstop. Despite the stop being a 'slash and dash', Jos Verstappen joined the field in 7th behind the McLaren of Mika Hakkinen and was unable to make any significant gains until the end of the race.

Recently Tom Walkinshaw has claimed that his team needs to qualify in the top 12 because that is what they are capable of doing. One of the major snags with a top 12 grid position is the likelyhood of becoming tangled in a 1st corner incident, like that which happened at Melbourne a week ago. As it happened, for that race, OrangeArrows would probably have just made it through and out of the resulting groups of teams that made it to the finish would have been capable of scoring points. Alas it was a chance blown by an electrical (although some sources have claimed it to be a software) problem on the formation lap dummy grid.

After the Australian race, Technical Director Mike Coughlan claimed that it would never happen again. Although the team haven't been doing any development running over the period between Melbourne and Sepang, they have been running through a process that aims to do exactly what Coughlan wants.

When asked what the team were doing to avoid another 'Melbourne', Head of Marketing Steve Hood said, "When any technical issue is identified, the team has a standard procedure designed to identify and resolve any issue and ensure problems are not repeated." The team need to make sure that they do this process fully, because both the team and the fans need a good race this weekend and a good result at the end.

Unfortunately, we haven't yet seen what OrangeArrows can do under race conditions. The same has to be said for the majority of the field which were cancelled out of the Australian Grand Prix at the first corner. Hopefully the team will have gained something from the practice and qualifying time at Melbourne, so at least those sessions will not start blind. As for the race itself - to this Arrows fan feels like the season opener all over again.