Lotus Renault driver Vitaly Petrov hoping for major upgrades to compete with top runners – Formula 1
Lotus Renault GP driver Vitaly Petrov has said that he is hoping for a “few big upgrades” soon in order to once again compete alongside the top running teams of Formula 1.
“I hope it will still be a strong car because you never know how it will affect you or how it will affect other people. I hope other people will be more affected than us because otherwise we won't be so quick,” said Petrov.
Since it is expected that the off-throttle Blown Diffusers will be banned starting from the upcoming British Grand Prix, Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing team’s aerodynamics specialist stated that the team to suffer the most from this ban is going to be Renault.
On the other hand, it is believed that Red Bull Racing will lose around 5 tenths of a second from its qualifying pace as a result of this ban and the battle for the titles up in front is expected to become more competitive as well.
Renault scored two podiums at the first two races of the season after which it was believed that the team might even challenge McLaren and Ferrari quite actively throughout the 2011 Formula 1 season for podiums. However, since then, both of Renault drivers
Vitaly Petrov and Nick Heidfeld have not been able to secure a single podium.
“At the beginning of the season we were really quite strong but then I think we lost some performance, maybe some other teams were improving better than us. But we're working on this; we know exactly where we lose time so we'll locate it for the next event
so at the next race we should have a few big updates and we'll try and fight with them,” said the young Russian.
Other than that, he added that scoring good points in the rest of the season is going to be quite difficult for Renault since Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and even Mercedes GP are improving their pace and keeping up with them is not going to be as easy as
it seems.
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