Team Lotus: Up and down, but pretty pleased overall

It was quite a rollercoaster Spanish GP for Team Lotus. Saturday was a high, when Kovalainen entered Q2 and qualified 15th, but it didn’t quite pay off in the end, although they had quite a strong start to the race. Heikki reflects:

“It’s a real shame my afternoon came to an end like that. I made a mistake on the entry to turn four and went off but up until that point the race was pretty good. Both Jarno and I were right in the mix early on and we were fighting in the midfield for a lot of the race but then the tyres started to go off and the early pace wasn’t there for the later stages of the afternoon.

“Maybe we should have pitted earlier on but we’ve still learnt a lot from this weekend and can take that to Monaco where I think it will be a very interesting weekend for everyone,” he said.

“Heikki made a small mistake on lap 52 and then Jarno had a cracked exhaust which meant we had to keep an eye on that, but overall we have made real progress this weekend and have amassed a great deal of data on the new package that will help us learn how to get the most out of all the changes, so it is another positive weekend for the whole team,” said Mike Gascoyne, Chief Technical Officer.

Deputy Team Principal Kamarudin Meranun sounded quite upbeat too: “There are a number of positives to take from this afternoon – we were able to fight with the established teams and have shown that we are consistently improving, little by little. That is the key goal for this year and we keep moving forward so we leave Spain pretty pleased overall.”

© 2011 Paul Tan's Automotive News. All Rights Reserved.

This story originally appeared on Paul Tan's Automotive News on Sun, 22 May 11 20:40:54 +0000.

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