 Marques Excluded from the British GP Saturday July 14th, 2001 Brazilian Tarso Marques will not start Sunday's British Grand Prix, after he failed to qualify and the stewards rejected Minardi's appeal on his behalf. Marques's time of 1:26.506 seconds was outside the qualifying time limit of 1:26.078. An official statement said Minardi had requested that Marques be allowed to start. "The stewards of the meeting have decided that there are no exceptional circumstances which would allow car number 20 (Tarso Marques) to take part in the warm-up or the race," the statement said. Marques' teammate Fernando Alonso was able to qualify for the race, lapping more than 1.5 seconds quicker than the Brazilian to set the 21st fastest time. "Today has been extremely disappointing, but at least I can take comfort from the fact that I know I drove as hard as I could," said Marques. "Unfortunately, a throttle problem with the engine after the second run prevented me from improving my time in the way I normally would have expected. "Making matters worse, there was insufficient time remaining to change the settings of the spare car from Fernando's to mine. I therefore went back out in my normal race car for the final run, but was unable to improve my lap time."
Published at 14:55:01 GMT
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(03-16-2005): 
