After more than a month of rest, the GP2 Series teams and drivers were back on-track this weekend at Red Bull Ring in Spielberg. The fourth round of the 2014 season starts a pretty busy period before the summer break and the teams will face four events in six weeks.

Practice went according to plan, with a good race run, ensuring the car was on form for a good weekend of results.

Qualifying did not go well and Quaife-Hobbs suffered a puncture that ruined his first run on new tyres, while, with the second set of tyres he logged the 14th fastest lap time, less than 0.6s behind the pole sitter. Unfortunately, he was penalized 3 positions for exceeding track limits, and had to settle for the 9th row .

Race one began with high hopes for a recovery, when there was a collision, just a few hundred meters after the start. The British racer made contact with

Leal at the first corner, after the latter was off to a difficult start, Quaife-Hobbs was then forced to a lengthy pit-stop to replace a damaged front wing. After getting back to the track more than a lap behind the leader, he began lapping at the same pace as the top three drivers , but crossing the line in a disappointing 24th place.

Adrian Quaife-Hobbs comments on race 1

I started well but at the first corner I was caught out by the early breaking of Leal. I don’t know if he was having problems, but he hit the brakes much earlier than usual and as I tried to brake, I touched the rear of his car, damaging my front wing in the process. Unfortunately, my ambitions disappeared after a few hundreds of meters. The necessary pit-stop made me lose valuable track time, due to the time replacing the front wing, and a puncture to my front tyre. But I was pleased with the pace of the car and look forward to better races to come.

Race two followed much of the same disappointment – the sprint race with no mandatory pit stop was a challenge on the tyres and with the race running at a very fast pace, the Rapax cars suffered on performance. With drivers soon settling into a train, the final result for Adrian was 18th

Adrian Quaife-Hobbs – comments on Race 2

Starting from the back always has a different set of challenges and this was defiantly the case today- we had high hopes for this weekend as my engineer and I did so much technical work, it is disappointing to have this over shadowed by out side forces.

We now look forward to Silverstone where we hope our engineering skills will produce a performing car, to enable us to collect championship points.
The series next is at Silverstone, UK over the weekend of the 4-6 July.

This post was written by JM