Lotus confident of championship fight in 2013 - Formula 1 news
Lotus are confident of fighting for the Formula 1 championship this season after finishing fourth in the constructor’s battle in 2012.
The team proved to be a surprise last year and pulled off some spectacular results, with their driver Kimi Raikkonen winning the Abu Dhabi GP. However, the car
did not have enough pace to fight for victories with consistency.
Due to this, Lotus failed to challenge their rivals on most of the occasions, even when their drivers Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean were in a position to finish
on top of the podium.
Moreover, the latter of the two drivers was unable to hold his nerves on most of the times and was involved in numerous first lap incidents, which affected the
team’s performance badly at the end of the day.
On the other hand, Raikkonen was far more consistent and finished every race last year. He did not make any mistakes and kept on pushing extremely hard for improvement.
Although luck favoured him in Abu Dhabi, he grabbed the opportunity with both hands and did not choke under pressure.
The Iceman seems confident of delivering the goods this year and believes that the car is better compared to what it was in 2012.
He said, “I think you always want more, but this car is a pretty good starting point and we'll see; hopefully we're fast enough. I don't think there's any area
where it feels worse than last year's car; so far everything is better. We had good speed last year, but not enough to win the championship.”
Lotus proved to be extremely strong in terms of tyre management, an area where rest of the teams struggled a lot. Therefore, the team’s technical director James
Allison is hopeful for a solid fight against top teams.
He stated, “Our car doesn't look bad against the opposition from what we can deduce, and we have a good team and good drivers behind it. It's certainly closer than
last year, but we expected this going into a second season of relatively stable regulations.”
None of the teams seem to be in a dominant position right now, which will make things quite interesting. However, the preseason testing suggests that Red Bull,
Lotus, Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes will all be battling at the front in Australia.
Tags: