Formula One news

Spyker B-car debut delayed

The Spyker Formula 1 team planned to race their new B-spec car at this weekend's Turkish Grand Prix but the team has now revealed they are unable to compete with their new cars as their car failed a crash test.

The Spyker F1 team has been waiting for months to run their upgraded cars at the Turkish Grand Prix. The team's chief designer Mike Gascoyne and his team worked on the improvement of the Spyker F8-VII many hours, but the team faced a major disappointment when the car failed in the rear crash test. Gascoyne explained: "Unfortunately last week we had an unexpected failure of the rear crash test, possibly due to problems with a batch of material used. Unfortunately all the other structures available we had to test were from this batch and the modifications we tried to make were not sufficient. These tests are quite rightly very stringent and difficult to pass, but we did not expect to have a problem as the structure is very similar to the A spec one. We are confident that we understand the problem however and should be able to pass with no problems next week."

Gascoyne added, "We will now concentrate on doing the best we can this weekend. As we were aware we had a problem we brought two A spec cars as well as two B spec cars, so we will not have any problems switching back, but it's just disappointing not to have the performance increase as planned. On a more positive note, we will now be able to test the car at the pre-Italian Grand Prix test next week at Monza, which should allow us to be in better shape."

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