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Galatasaray followed in the footsteps of renowned football clubs when they pledged their commitment to participate in the brand new global car racing competition called Superleague Formula. The Turkish club unveiled its Superleague Formula car at a special place: on the club's very own island - situated in the middle of the Bosphorus river in Istanbul between the continents of Europe and Asia.
Galatasaray will be supported by the Scuderia Playteam, who recently hired ex-Minardi and Toro Rosso Formula 1 technical chief Gabriele Tredozi as its new Technical Director. Scuderia Playteam are looking to challenge for immediate honours and two of the potential drivers of the Galatasaray car, former Italian GT championship winner and Playteam regular, Italian, Alessandro Pier Guidi and Turkish local hero, GP2 racer Jason Tahinci, already took part in an evaluation testing session aboard Formula 3000 cars in Italy.
Superleague Formula's inaugural race season will visit six major circuits across Europe, from August â€' November 2008. Superleague Formula will see twenty cars compete against one another in August 2008 for the first time, at Donington Park in the United Kingdom on August 30/31. PSV is one of the participating clubs, alongside AC Milan, FC Porto and Olympique Lyon.
Test driver Bruce Jouanny was delighted with the results of the first testing sessions at Donington Park and praised the Superleague Formula for its speed and powerful V-12 engine. 'We have been able to put some good miles on the car and get everything up to temperature and up to speed,' said Jouanny. 'At the end of the day I was able to do a longer run where I could really start to put the tyres under load and push the engine harder, which was great.' The French test driver was happy with the tremendous amount of torque, but stated that this was only the first phase of the engine development, adding that they were working through mapping options. He was full of praise for the chassis. 'The Elan chassis responds to changes really well, you can really feel every adjustment and it has an enormous amount of downforce. The track was pretty cold and slippery but you could really lean on the lateral grip. Braking is also very impressive. The carbon brakes are very strong and the V12 Menard powerplant offers a lot of engine braking â€' that will be one of the things which the drivers in this championship will take a while to get used to.'
Here is the Superleague Formula prototype in action at Donington Park
Arbiter
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Yellow card(s)
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