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Another McLaren Penalised

Heikki Kovalainen will join his teammate to suffer penalties at the start of the French GP, when he was found guilty of impeding Mark Webber.

Already his teammate Lewis Hamilton, who set the third fastest time during the qualifying session, will be demoted 10 grids down so he will start from the 13th spot. He was penalised for the crash into Ferrari's Kimi Räikkönen in the Canadian GP when he failed to spot the red light and the two stationary cars of Räikkönen and BMW's Robert Kubica, taking both himself and Räikkönen out of the race.

Kovalainen will now start from the 10th position, just 3 places ahead of his teammate. As the impeding incident, which was a case of miscommunication in his own words, happened in Q1, the McLaren team had the foresight to fuel the Finn heavier so that he could have a longer run in the first stint of the race and try to make up for the places lost.

Team Principal Ron Dennis remained optimistic for the team. Besides believing that Brit Hamilton will be able to score a good race result having shown his potential in qualifying, he also felt that the other McLaren can do well too despite the penalty.

"Heikki, too, is in a pretty good position, despite his penalty. Again, it was one of those things: he and Nakajima tried to stay out of Webber’s way, but in their efforts to do so there was a bit of positional confusion and nowhere left for him to go. The result was that he compromised both his own and Mark’s laps. We have no objection to his penalty, and look forward to an exciting and challenging day tomorrow.”

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.

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