HRT and Virgin Racing Team gap can be decreased – Tonio Liuzzi
Hispania Racing Team’s (HRT), Tonio Liuzzi, has recently revealed that he is confident despite the gap between his team and Virgin Racing Team.
The team’s 2011 car was tested for the first time during the qualifying session of the Australian Grand Prix and as a result, the team was unable to test, or, evaluate its new car during the free practice sessions, or, the Malaysian Grand Prix before the
beginning of the 2011 Formula 1 season.
“I think that is a true reflection of our form at the moment. I think maybe we could have gone a few tenths faster, but we are pretty happy about where we were in qualifying and we showed that we have a good chance to close the gap soon”, said Tonio.
The first race was quite disastrous for the team as both of its drivers, Narain Karthikeyan, and Tonio Liuzzi failed to qualify as a result of which they were forced out of the first race of the season according to the 107% rule reintroduced by the FIA.
However, the new car looked much better at the second race of the season, as both of the drivers managed to qualify for the race at least.
In terms of pace, it seems that Virgin Racing Team are their main opponents this season as Liuzzi was just 0.5 seconds off from Virgin Racing Team’s Jerome d’Ambrosio during the qualifying session of the Malaysian Grand Prix.
He added that the new car has some positive aspects, which the team is hoping to benefit from and those aspects are going to affect the upcoming upgrades the team is going to apply to its new car before the coming two races of the season.
“On the plus side I think the balance of the car is not too bad, the engine is working really well and we have some other good points. There is potential, we just need to accumulate mileage and understand, which way we need to go for the future”, Liuzzi
added.
Tonio believes that since the team is improving, they have the ability to close in on Virgin and score better results than them as well at the Chinese Grand Prix.
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