Assen 6 March 2011 Today was the shakedown of the SPAA05-GT57 after the winter stop featuring the new body and the Elite sequential gearbox at the TT-circuit of Assen.

The weather was great, lots of sun and not much wind. The track was completely booked, so there was some waiting time each time we wanted to go out on the track, but nothing serious. I was very pleased with this gearbox, feel was good and mechanical, operating the gear-lever was easy and the speed of which you can change gears up and down is much faster than I could achieve with the old box. The gearbox makes this amazing whine that gets intenser as the revs go up. We found that it makes it hard to communicate, but it adds greatly to the feeling of speed and it just sounds awesome (you can hear it from the outside as well!). The car felt a bit trickier when accelerating out of corners as the new gearbox is about 30kg heavier then the manual H-pattern, but this could also be due to the low temperature of the tarmac and the fact that we were using old tires. In the next training we will be working to fix this and we expect no problem in this. Overall the day went without any trouble, we had much fun and were very pleased with the new car. Check out the media section for pictures of the new car!