Unfortunate weekend for Bamboo Engineering at Hungaroring

The Bamboo GP3 team, fresh from their recent victory in Germany, showed their strength in the practice session at the Hungaroring. Lewis Williamson set the pace for most of the session, leading the field until the last minute when his fastest time was pushed to second on the timesheets.

Melville McKee also had a promising session, running on old tyres for the whole session he was still fast enough to sit just outside the top ten.

Qualification saw both McKee and Williamson make a strong showing, McKee put in a fast lap to qualify 7th and Williamson, who set the 6th fastest time on worn tyres, was on his new tyre run and was set for a class leading time until he was held up, leaving him to settle for 6th!

Lewis Williamson

Photo by: GP3 Media Service

Race 1: "Starting from 6th and 7th, Williamson and McKee got off the line without incident and despite dropping to McKee 9th and Williamson 10th, both were going strong until tyre wear caused by a few large lock-ups affected McKee and caused traffic to back up behind him.

Williamson and Niederhauser passed McKee and Williamson was going strong, looking to claim 8th place from Visou, who ran off track twice to stay ahead of Williamson, unfortunately this wrong footed Williamson and Swiss driver Patric Niederhauser collided with the back of his car and forced him off the track, an incident that later saw Niederhauser penalised.

Both drivers dropped to the back of the grid with Williamson pushing to finish in P24. McKee continued to suffer with tyre wear and unfortunately dropped to 17th. Jorda had a good race and pushed hard, making up 5 places to finish in 21st."

Race 2: "Following the incidents in race 1, the Bamboo drivers started in the second half of the field, a tricky position to build from, all three drivers pushed hard until every team managers worst nightmare, contact between Williamson and McKee with 4 laps remaining, this saw both cars sustain damage and were forced to retire, with the safety car being deployed. Carmen Jorda however kept out of trouble and made up 6 places to finish 21st."

Richard Coleman - Chief Executive Bamboo, "I'm disappointed with this weekend, we had good pace and should have turned this into podiums and points, unfortunately we have come away empty handed. The race 2 incident is unacceptable, Lewis was 100% at fault but he has apologised to Melville, myself and the team.

He is going to be hard enough on himself but the situation is clear, contact between team mates is unacceptable and not what any team principal wants to see. We will move on as a team and hope to capitalise on our good form for Spa."

Bamboo GP3 team