Andrea Piccini and the Lamborghini Murcielago's debut on the Dubai circuit ended prematurely due to a gearbox problem that struck them at the 55th lap.

Regardless of these inevitable problems that a car this young can have, the Lamborghini has shown encouraging improvement. Andrea Piccini was able to set the third best time during the warm up before the race on Friday.

Andrea had a steady fast pace that allowed him to climb his way up from the 12th place on the grid to the fifth place during his driving stint.

Unfortunately to fix a few technical inconveniences, the duo Piccini & Deletraz lost almost two hours of the free practice session and were only able to do about seven laps during the first hour of the qualifying session.

In spite of all of these mishaps, Andrea is satisfied with the car's progress, with the team's work and with the tyres.

“We had a few technical problems till Thursday that influenced our performance," said Andrea. "We weren't able to run continuously during the free practice session and we paid the price for that during the qualifying session. Moreover, the track conditions changed over 24 hours and this wasn't to our advantage.

"The car did improve km after km and had we been able to work in better conditions, we could have set a great time during the qualifications. To prove this we had the third best time during the warm up and it was even better than what we did the day before. I started the race well. I slowly started conquering positions and climbed my way up to the fifth place. It's a pity that the broken gear box forced my team-mate Deletraz to retire.

Despite this, I'm very happy about the car's progress race after race. I'm sure that all of these reliability problems will be solved when we set up an intense test session.

In fact these races represent in a way our first test sessions to develop the car and to help us prepare for the 2005 season.