Sakon Yamamoto joins Spyker for rest of season

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European Grand Prix race leader Markus Winkelhock will not continue as a race driver for Spyker.

The team is set to announced Sakon Yamamoto as team mate to Adrian Sutil for the race of the season, starting at the Hungaroring next week.

Yamamoto drove for Super Aguri in the second half of 2006 and has been their test driver this year. He has also raced for BCN in GP2 but is yet to score in 11 races.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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9 comments on “Sakon Yamamoto joins Spyker for rest of season”

  1. Spyker: “Even if we employ a decent driver like Klien we’ll still be at the back of the grid, so lets just employ some random person with lots of money.”

  2. Ooooooh, that smarts! Right on, Phill. :D

  3. Damn, I was wanting Jos Verstappen to make an F1 return.

  4. Robert Mckay
    25th July 2007, 17:17

    Surely there’s some better drivers with lots of money. What happened to Karthikeyan? I’d take him over Yamamoto.

  5. Karthikeyan and Klien, the first two choices (talented *and* rich) were both tied to testing contracts at Williams and Honda respectively, from what I can gather. Nelson Piquet Jr. turned Spyker down, and Nico Hulkenburg’s manager (Willi Weber) and Spyker’s boss (Colin Kolles) simply don’t get on. With those tied to F1 contracts not moving, the list of credible drivers becomes small. Anyway, since the F1 team is funding the manufacturer, it was inevitable that it would cost a fair bit of money to be in the Spyker.

  6. I understand why Spyker can’t choose Glock, but I think the objective is to choose a driver that’s capable of getting into points.

    They should be looking for F3 and ChampCar defectors, if they don’t think their test team is good enough.

  7. Did anyone notice since Yamamoto has moved to Spyker, James Rossiter (Honda test driver) has moved to the test seat Yamamoto vacated and his first two days in the Super Aguri he’s topped Klein and Barrichello in their Hondas.

  8. I would not take the test times of Honda and Aguri that seriously, especially Honda must be experimenting a lot trying to get out of the mess they are in. If tetsing was any indication of things to come, what would we make of this :-) :

    Mugello Circuit – Italy 24 July 2007
    1) V. Liuzzi – Scuderia Toro Rosso – 01:24.203
    2) L. Badoer – Ferrari – 01:24.633

    Yamamoto though is definitelly much better choice than Ide would be :-)
    As for his performance, last year he only finished 3 races. One of them Sato did not finish, so can’t compare their perfomances. The last 2 that both Aguris made to finish, he ended up a lap down on Sato… But this may also mean Sato is just way too good …

  9. http://www.spykerf1.com/?pag=89&newsid=438

    finalized, yamamoto confirmed for the rest of the season.

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