Virgin Racing will be more consistent in 2011: Nick Wirth
The technical director of Virgin Racing team, Nick Wirth, is confident that his team will set high standards in the upcoming Formula One season.
Virgin Racing was one of three new teams that debuted in 2010. However, they had a number of reliability issues, which didn’t allow the team to score points and challenge fellow newcomers Lotus and Hispania Racing Team (HRT).
However, the team will not only be aiming to beat Lotus and HRT in 2011, they will also be looking forward to scoring points regularly throughout the season.
Virgin’s new challenger for the 2011 season was launched yesterday in London and Wirth was confident that the new car would be a huge step forward compared to its debut season.
Wirth stated, “We thought we were between one and two seconds off, in terms of pure speed, of being able to get into Q2, and that is what we have tried to find this winter so that we can give our drivers a chance to fight their way into Q2 on a regular basis.”
He further added that Virgin had a very good driver line-up and the team would be able to score points without any fluke.
He admitted that the team thought of copying the unique exhaust system introduced by Lotus Renault, but eventually decided against it. However, the team has developed its first blown diffuser, which was missing last season.
Virgin’s main focus will be reliability of the car. The team will be eying to finish all the races and only then will they have a chance to score points consistently. Wirth said that there would be no major developments in the team until the start of the
races in Europe.
Virgin Racing is looking forward to capitalise on the opportunity of scoring points in the first half of the season by finishing races. All the other teams will undergo major developments at the start of the season, which may cause some reliability issues
for them.
Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) was considered to be a vital part of the 2011 season but Virgin has opted not to use the technology in the first half of the season.
In 2009, KERS didn’t prove as effective as it was considered to be. The teams using KERS had to carry additional weight, which was a big disadvantage. However, the minimum weight of the cars in 2011 has been increased to make this technology useful.
Wirth claimed that his team had learned a lot from the mistakes it made last year, but said that last year's performances were history and Virgin was committed to being more competitive in 2011.
Although all new teams have vowed to be stronger than the last year, Lotus seems to be the strongest and they might be finishing in the points more consistently than HRT and Virgin.
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