Bruno Senna is confident the HRT car will outpace it’s rival newcomers by around a second, despite having completed no testing at all.
While the Virgin and Lotus have managed to set around 300 and 600 laps respectively, they have often been off the pace by four seconds.
“It has not been an easy winter, but I am naturally very glad that everything has played out so far that HTR, as the new team is called, will be in Bahrain,” Senna wrote in his Motorsport column.
“Lotus and Virgin were, in Barcelona, only a good second faster than the GP2 cars, of which Dallara has all the data,” said Senna.
“And, according to their calculations, we should be faster at the first attempt by at least two seconds to the GP2…
“Naturally, much of that will also depend on whether the car is reliable to some extent from the beginning.
“I hope that with the experience of the Dallara people and secondly with a bit of luck that the few problems like those which have plagued the other newcomers a lot at the beginning, particularly with hydraulics that are not team specific, have now generally been discarded.”
